Unveiling the Wheat Microbiome under Varied Agricultural Field Conditions
Loading...
Date
2022-11
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Wheat being the important staple food crop plays a significant role in
nutritional security. A wide variety of microbial communities beneficial to plants and
contributing to plant health and production are found in the rhizosphere. The wheat
microbiome encompasses an extensive variety of microbial species playing a key role
in sustaining the physiology of the crop, nutrient uptake, and biotic/abiotic stress
resilience. This report presents wheat microbiome analysis under six different farm
practices, namely, organic (Org), timely sown (TS), wheat after pulse crop (WAPC), tem
perature-controlled phenotyping facility (TCPF), maize-wheat cropping system (MW),
and residue burnt field (Bur), using 16S rRNA sequencing methodology. The soil sam
ples collected from either side of the wheat row were mixed to get a final sample set
for DNA extraction under each condition. After the data preprocessing, microbial com
munity analysis was performed, followed by functional analysis and annotation. An
abundance of the phylum Proteobacteria was observed, followed by Acidobacteria,
Actinobacteria, andGemmatimonadetes in the majority of the samples, while relative
abundance was found to vary at the genus level. Analysis against the Carbohydrate
Active Enzymes (CAZy) database showed a high number of glycoside hydrolase genes
in the TS, TCPF, and WAPC samples, while the Org, MW, and Bur samples predomi
nantly had glycosyltransferase genes and carbohydrate esterase genes were in the low
est numbers. Also, the Org and TCPF samples showed lower diversity, while rare and
abundant species ranged from 12 to 25% and 20 to 32% of the total bacterial species
in all the sets, respectively. These variations indicate that the different cropping
sequence had a significant impact on soil microbial diversity and community composi
tion, which characterizes its economic and environmental value as a sustainable agri
cultural approach to maintaining food security and ecosystem health.