Response of soil microbiome structure and its network profiles to four soil amendments in monocropping strawberry greenhouse

Abstract

With the constant surge of strawberry cultivation and human demand, widespread concern has been expressed about the severe soil and plant health problems caused by continuous strawberry cropping, particularly monocropping in greenhouses. Effective microorganisms (EM) and Bacillus subtilis (BS) have been extensively commercialized as biological control agents (BCAs) to promote plant growth and yield enhancement. However, their effects on soil microbes are obscure. To regulate the microbial community in continuous cropping strawberry soils, we developed four soil amendments based on these two BCAs by adding low and high contents of compost. The amplicon sequencing of bacterial and fungal ribosomal markers was applied to study the response of the soil microbiome structure. We noticed a sharp increase in bacterial diversity after adding EM-treated high compost and BS-treated low compost, while there was no significant change in fungal diversity among treatments. Through taxonomic classification and FUNGuild analysis, we found that the application of soil amendments resulted in a significant decline in the relative abundance of fungal plant pathogens (Rhizopus, Penicillium and Fusarium) in the soils; accordingly, the metabolic functions of a range of detrimental fungi were inhibited. Correlation analysis indicated that soil microbial community was indirectly driven by soil physicochemical properties. Co-occurrence networks revealed that soil amendments contributed to the connectivity of bacterial network, and EM-treated with high compost was the most complex and balanced. Collectively, EM-treated high compost and BS-treated low compost can well regulate the microbial community structure and thus maintain soil health.

Fe(II) Addition Drives Soil Bacterial Co-Ocurrence Patterns and Functions Mediated by Anaerobic and Chemoautotrophic Taxa

“…Utilizing network analysis, the co-occurrence patterns of bacterial taxa were illustrated with the R package igraph [ 37 , 38 ]. We adopted Spearman’s correlation test to obtain a strong correlation ( r > |0.9|, p < 0.01) between the 30 most abundant genera of bacterial communities.…”

Shifts in soil microbial diversity and functions during continuous cropping of strawberry

“…Microorganisms are essential for maintaining soil fertility and ecological function (Alami et al, 2021; Corato, 2020; Shen et al, 2020). Studies have identified soil microbial communities as critical to CC sickness (Chen et al, 2022; Liu, Khan, et al, 2021; Liu, Wang, et al, 2021). Soil physicochemical properties also regulate microbial responses to nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium availability during CC (Tan et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2020).…”

Soil amendment with cow dung modifies the soil nutrition and microbiota to reduce the ginseng replanting problem

“…Co-occurrence network analysis is a novel method that helps us to understand the complex association among microbial communities in soil ecosystems and highlights how such complex interaction is impacted by agricultural activities ( Goberna and Verdú, 2022 ). The more clustered network and firmly connected microbial community in cow dung could potentially make the community highly stable ( Sun et al., 2015 ) to soil sickness owing to continuous ginseng monocropping ( He et al., 2021 ), pathogen colonization ( Rybakova et al., 2017 ), and environmental stresses ( He et al., 2021 ), thereby maintaining soil health ( Liu et al., 2021a ). In contrast, scattered niches in control and canola would harm the prompt defense against foreign pathogen invasion ( Tao et al., 2018 ).…”