Abstract
To improve the nitrogen utilization efficiency and a series of environmental problems caused by excessive application of nitrogen fertilizer, actual agricultural production often reduced the usage ratio of nitrogen fertilizer. However, the reduction in nitrogen fertilizer not only affects the soil microenvironment but also leads to adverse effects on rice yield. Due to its unique properties, biochar can regulate soil nutrient distribution and significantly affect soil microbial community structure/functions. To further understand the effects of different levels of biochar on soil nutrient indicators, soil microorganisms and crop growth under the nitrogen-reduction condition, our experiment with four groups was set up as followed: 0%, 2.5% and 5% biochar application rates with 99 kg/hm2 nitrogen fertilizer and one control group (the actual fertilizer standard used in the field:110 kg/hm2) without no exogenous biochar supplement. The rice yield and soil nutrient indexes were observed, and the differences between groups were analyzed based on multiple comparisons. 16S ribosomal RNA and ITS sequencing were used to analyze the community structure of soil bacteria and fungi. Redundancy analysis was performed to obtain the correlation relationships between microbial community marker species, soil nutrient indexes, and rice yield. Path analysis was used to determine the mechanism by which soil nutrient indexes affect rice yield. The results showed that a higher application rate of biochar led to a significant increased trend in the soil pH, organic matter and total nitrogen content. In addition, a high concentration of biochar under nitrogen-reduction condition decreased the soil bacterial diversity but elevated the fungal diversity. Different concentrations of biochar resulted in these changes in the relative abundance of soil bacteria/fungi but did not alter the dominant species taxa. Taken together, appropriate usage for biochar under the nitrogen-reduction background could induce alteration in soil nutrient indicators, microbial communities and crop yields. These results provide a theoretical basis for exploring scientific, green and efficient fertilization strategies in the rice cultivation industry. Notably, the interaction relationship between rhizosphere microorganisms in rice and soil microbial taxa are not yet clear, so further research on its detailed effects on rice production is needed. In addition, the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment analysis for the physiological functions of the soil microbes could only predict the potential metabolic pathways. Therefore, the next-generation metagenome techonology might be performed to explore detailed metabolic differences and accurate taxa alteration at the "species" level.
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Data availability
Original data and raw sequencing files that were generated in this study are available from the corresponding author on request with a completed Data Transfer Agreement (Hui Liu).
Abbreviations
- PCR:
-
Polymerase chain reaction
- ASV:
-
Amplicon sequence variants
- LDA:
-
Linear Discriminant Analysis
- LEfSe:
-
Linear Discriminant Analysis effect size
- SE:
-
Standard error
- ANOVA:
-
One-way analysis of variance analysis
- RDA:
-
Redundancy analysis
- PA:
-
Path analysis
- PCoA:
-
Principal component analysis
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Acknowledgements
The study was supported by the Experimental Center of the School of Water Resources and Civil Engineering, Northeast Agricultural University. All authors would thank Lian Chuan-Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (Hangzhou, China) for their assistance during the raw sequencing data analysis. Acknowledgments of AJE company for their help in editing the language of this paper.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation Project (51479033), Heilongjiang Province Postdoctoral Fund Project (LBH-Z17017) and the Development Project of the Key Laboratory for Efficient Utilization of Agricultural Water Resources of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (2017009).
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All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Conceived and designed the current experimental plans by Hui Liu and Yan Jiao:. Wrote the manuscript and completed the experiments. By Yan Jiao. Performed the experiments by Jiao Yan and Wanyu Dou. Analyzed the data by Wenlong Zhang. Revised the manuscript by Hui Liu, Yan Jiao and Yutao Li.
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Jiao, Y., Li, Y., Dou, W. et al. Biochar alleviates the crop failure of rice production induced by low-nitrogen cultivation mode by regulating the soil microbes taxa composition. Arch Microbiol 205, 361 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03700-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03700-y