Home
Deutsch
Advanced Search
Browse by ...
Publication overview
Contact persons
Help
Publ. Version/Full Text
Research data
DOI
PMC
 |
Open Access Gold |
|
as soon as is submitted to ZB.
A long-term field experiment demonstrates the influence of tillage on the bacterial potential to produce soil structure-stabilizing agents such as exopolysaccharides and lipopolysaccharides.
Environ. Microbiome 14:1 (2019)
Background: Stable soil aggregates are essential for optimal crop growth and preventing soil erosion. However, tillage is often used in agriculture to loosen the soil, which disrupts the integrity of these aggregates. Soil aggregation can be enhanced by bacteria through their ability to produce exopolysaccharides and lipopolysaccharides. These compounds stabilize soil aggregates by "gluing" soil particles together. However, it has yet to be shown how tillage influences the bacterial potential to produce aggregate-stabilizing agents. Therefore, we sampled conventional and reduced tillage treatments at 0-10 cm, 10-20 cm and 20-50 cm from a long-term field trial in Frick, Switzerland. We compared the stable aggregate fraction of the soil and the bacterial potential to produce exopolysaccharides (EPS) and lipopolysaccharides (LPS) under different tillage regimes by employing a shotgun metagenomic approach. We established a method which combines hidden Markov model searches with blasts against sequences derived from the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes database to analyze genes specific for the biosynthesis of these compounds.Results: Our data revealed that the stable aggregate fraction as well as the bacterial potential to produce EPS and LPS were comparable under both tillage regimes. The highest potential to produce these compounds was found in the upper soil layer, which was disturbed by tillage, but had higher content of organic carbon compared to the layer below the tillage horizon. Additionally, key players of EPS and LPS production differed at different sampling depths. Some families with high potential to produce EPS and LPS, such as Chitinophagaceae and Bradyrhizobiaceae, were more abundant in the upper soil layers, while others, e.g. Nitrospiraceae and Planctomycetaceae, preferred the lowest sampled soil depth. Each family had the potential to form a limited number of different aggregate-stabilizing agents.Conclusions: Our results indicate that conventional tillage and reduced tillage equally promote the bacterial potential to produce EPS and LPS in the tillage horizon. However, as major bacterial groups triggering EPS and LPS formation were not the same, it is likely that gene expression pattern differ in the different treatments due to various pathways of gene induction and transcription in different bacterial species.
Altmetric
Additional Metrics?
Edit extra informations
Login
Publication type
Article: Journal article
Document type
Scientific Article
Keywords
Tillage ; Soil Aggregates ; Exopolysaccharides ; Lipopolysaccharides ; Soil Microbiome ; Metagenomics ; Wza ; Lptf ; Lptg; Polymeric Substances Eps; Microbial Communities; Reduced Tillage; Crop-rotation; Conservation Tillage; Physical-properties; Outer-membrane; Organic-matter; No-tillage; Management
ISSN (print) / ISBN
2524-6372
e-ISSN
2524-6372
Journal
Environmental Microbiome
Quellenangaben
Volume: 14,
Issue: 1
Article Number: 1
Publisher
BioMed Central
Publishing Place
Campus, 4 Crinan St, London N1 9xw, England
Non-patent literature
Publications
Reviewing status
Peer reviewed
Institute(s)
Research Unit Comparative Microbiome Analysis (COMI)