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A healthy soil acts as a dynamic living system that delivers multiple ecosystem services, such as sustaining water quality and plant productivity, controlling soil nutrient recycling decomposition, and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Soil health is closely associated with sustainable agriculture, because soil microorganism diversity and activity are the main components of soil health. Agricultural sustainability is defined as the ability of a crop production system to continuously produce food without environmental degradation. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), cyanobacteria, and beneficial nematodes enhance water use efficiency and nutrient availability to plants, phytohormones production, soil nutrient cycling, and plant resistance to environmental stresses. Farming practices have shown that organic farming and tillage improve soil health by increasing the abundance, diversity, and activity of microorganisms. Conservation tillage can potentially increase grower’s profitability by reducing inputs and labor costs as compared to conventional tillage while organic farming might add extra management costs due to high labor demands for weeding and pest control, and for fertilizer inputs (particularly N-based), which typically have less consistent uniformity and stability than synthetic fertilizers. This review will discuss the external factors controlling the abundance of rhizosphere microbiota and the impact of crop management practices on soil health and their role in sustainable crop production.

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Two loci, C and i-C, were previously reported to determine flesh colors between canary yellow and red watermelon (Citrullus lanatus). Recently, lycopene β-cyclase (LCYB) was found as a color determinant gene for canary yellow (C) and a codominant cleaved amplified polymorphic sequence (CAPS) marker was developed to identify canary yellow and red alleles. The inhibitor of canary yellow (i-C), as reported in a previous work, was not detected in our original family derived from a cross between canary yellow and red parents. To identify additional genetic determinants such as i-C, we prepared a new family using ‘Yellow Doll’ (canary yellow) and ‘Sweet Princess’ (red), which was reported to carry the inhibitor gene i-C as parents. A new distinct class of flesh color, pale yellow, was identified in the progeny from the new canary yellow × red cross. The predominant carotenoid in canary yellow and pale yellow phenotypes was neoxanthin, followed by violaxanthin and neochrome; pale yellow contained less total carotenoids, but had more minor carotenoids compared with canary yellow. The chi-square goodness-of-fit test indicated that there are two genes involved in determining flesh color among canary yellow, pale yellow, and red, but the segregation pattern did not fit the pattern as reported for an i-C gene. When the genotype of the family ‘Yellow Doll’ × ‘Sweet Princess’ was analyzed with our LCYB CAPS marker, the flesh color of every individual perfectly cosegregated with the marker. The new pale yellow phenotype also cosegregated with the marker linked to the C allele, indicating that the recessive py phenotype (pale yellow) must carry at least one of the C alleles for expression. Therefore, we propose to designate py for a pale yellow determinant along with C as a canary yellow determinant. A homozygous recessive py gene resulted in pale yellow flesh color in the presence of a dominant C.

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