Abstract
Background and aims
Phosphorus (P) fertilization affects plant diversity and ecosystem function by changing the abundance and composition of functional soil microorganisms and genes. Understanding the mechanisms regulating the soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N), sulfur (S), and P cycle across different P fertilizer inputs is crucial to the management of P in sustainable agroecosystems.
Methods
We investigated whether soil functional microorganisms affected the coupling of the abundance of soil C, N, P, and S genes under long-term (up to 14 years) P fertilizer input (0, 21.8, 43.6, and 87.2 kg P ha−1 yr−1) on the Loess Plateau of China.
Results
Long-term P fertilizer input resulted in the increased abundance of soil functional microorganisms and the expression of soil C cycle genes but decreased soil P cycle genes. The relative abundance of ecological clusters (including bacteria, fungi, and archaea) was significantly correlated with functional genes related to the C, N, P, and S cycles. Soil Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Cyanobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Chloroflexi were the keystone taxa mediating soil nutrient cycling in wheat fields. Both Mantel’s test and structural equation modeling indicated that the shifts in soil available C and P were the major factors driving the coupling of soil functional microorganisms and genes.
Conclusions
The changes in soil microorganisms and genes can drive soil nutrient cycling and promote crop growth, suggesting that their relationship can provide new insight for understanding the microbial mechanisms of soil P turnover in sustainable agroecosystems.
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Data availability
The soil microbiome sequences are deposited into the Sequence Archive of the China National GeneBank DataBase (https://db.cngb.org/cnsa/) with accession number CNP0000424. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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This work was supported by the grants from the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant number 2021YFD1900700), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number 32072669) and the Science and Technology Research Program of Shaanxi Province (Grant number 2022PT-06).
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JL, and ZW conceived and designed the experiments. LL, YG and WY performed the experiments. LL analyzed the data and wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Liu, L., Gao, Y., Yang, W. et al. Community metagenomics reveals the processes of nutrient cycling regulated by microbial functions in soils with P fertilizer input. Plant Soil 499, 139–154 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-05875-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-05875-1