Sugarcane-Peanut Intercropping System Enhances Bacteria Abundance, Diversity, and Sugarcane Parameters in Rhizospheric and Bulk Soils.

Ziqin Pang,Muhammad Tayyab,Yongmei Zhou,Peiying Weng,Wenxiong Lin,Yijie Xiao,Zhaonian Yuan,Yueming Liu,Chaohua Hu,Xiumei Tang,Yongjun Kan,Qiang Liu,Nyumah Fallah

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2021.815129

Ziqin Pang, Muhammad Tayyab + Show 11 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2021.815129

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Abstract

Sugarcane–legume intercropping systems can effectively control pests and diseases as well as improve the fertility and health of farmland soil. However, little is known about the response of bacterial abundance, diversity, and community composition in the rhizosphere and non-rhizosphere soils under the sugarcane–peanut farming system. A field experiment was conducted with two treatments: sugarcane monoculture and sugarcane–peanut intercropping to examine the response of sugarcane parameters and edaphic factors. We also deciphered bacterial abundance, diversity, and community composition in the root endosphere, rhizosphere, and bulk soil by leveraging Illumina sequencing to conduct the molecular characterization of the 16S rRNA gene and nitrogenase (nifH) gene. We observed that sugarcane–peanut intercropping exhibited the advantages of tremendously increasing cane stalk height, stalk weight, and millable stalk number/20 m, and edaphic factors, namely, pH (1.13 and 1.93), and available phosphorus exhibited a fourfold and sixfold increase (4.66 and 6.56), particularly in the rhizosphere and bulk soils, respectively. Our result also showed that the sugarcane–peanut intercropping system significantly increased the bacterial richness of the 16S rRNA gene sequencing data by 13.80 and 9.28% in the bulk soil and rhizosphere soil relative to those in the monocropping sugarcane system, respectively. At the same time, sugarcane intercropping with peanuts significantly increased the Shannon diversity of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the sugarcane rhizosphere soil. Moreover, most edaphic factors exhibited a positive regularity effect on bacterial community composition under the intercropping system. A linear discriminant analysis with effect size analysis of the 16S rRNA sequencing data revealed that bacteria in the root endosphere of the intercropped cane proliferated profoundly, primarily occupied by Devosia, Rhizobiales, Myxococcales, Allorhizobium-Neorhizobium-Pararhizobium-Rhizobium, Bradyrhizobium, and Sphingomonas. In conclusion, our findings demonstrated that sugarcane–peanut intercropping can enhance edaphic factors, sugarcane parameters, and bacterial abundance and diversity without causing adverse impacts on crop production and soil.

Highlights

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) is the world’s most crucial sugar and energy crop (Lu et al, 2021; Tayyab et al, 2021), and it is mainly cultivated in tropical and subtropical climates with an annual production of about 16 million tons worldwide (Chandel et al, 2012; Khalil et al, 2018)
We observed that the available stalk number (103/hm2) decreased in sugarcane–peanut intercropping compared with the sugarcane monocropping field, which contradicts the findings reported by Malviya et al (2021) and Solanki et al (2020)
Our results demonstrated that soil sugarcane– peanut intercropping systems exhibited the advantage of tremendously increasing the aboveground growth of sugarcane

Summary

Introduction

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) is the world’s most crucial sugar and energy crop (Lu et al, 2021; Tayyab et al, 2021), and it is mainly cultivated in tropical and subtropical climates with an annual production of about 16 million tons worldwide (Chandel et al, 2012; Khalil et al, 2018). It is of essence to adopt an ameliorative agricultural approach that can supply adequate nutrients to maintain the high productivity in the sugarcane plant cycle and minimize reduction in the following cycles. Sugarcane– legumes intercropping systems have gained increasing traction in China and parts of Africa and have shown promising results in terms of production output, limiting N leaching (Himmelstein et al, 2016; Yin et al, 2018). Sugarcane–legume intercropping systems can stimulate the proliferation of N-fixation by the legume’s bacteria, further promoting soil health and fertility and the overall environmental conditions, thereby mutually benefiting both plants (Solanki et al, 2020). Solanki et al (2019) reported that sugarcane–legume intercropping systems profoundly increased soil-available potassium (K), total P, and the soil enzyme dehydrogenase. Numerous studies have shown that soil microbes in the rhizosphere and non-rhizosphere zones are responsive to intercropping systems (Howard et al, 2020; Liu et al, 2021)

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