Variation in rhizosphere microbial communities and its association with the nodulation ability of peanut

ABSTRACT

Harnessing the rhizobia-legume symbiosis is a promising strategy to confront sustainability in agriculture. Agricultural research on legume nodulation has mostly focused on abiotic parameters, yet the importance of biotic variables on legumes nodulation is still ambiguous. We explored the variation of bacterial communities in peanut rhizosphere soil under different agricultural practices (peanut fallow rotation and Vicia villosa Roth-peanut rotation) using Illumina sequencing. Samples were collected in 2020 from a 9-year study (2012–2020) located at Dongxiang countryside (Jiangxi province, China). Compared with peanut fallow rotation (PFR), Vicia villosa Roth-peanut rotation (VPR) significantly (p< 0.05) decreased soil pH (by 0.4–3.9%) and number of peanut nodules (by 20–63.7%). By using the Random forest tool, we found that the difference in peanut nodulation was associated with specific microbiome alterations. The indicator taxa positively responded to the peanut nodulation was enriched in the PFR practice, while VPR led to increased abundance of indicator taxa which negatively responded to peanut nodulation. The path analysis indicated that soil pH has an indirect effect on peanut nodulation through its link with the abundance of indicator taxa. Our work provides evidence that the variation in peanut rhizosphere microbial communities was associated with peanut nodulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Peanut nodulation
• agricultural practices
• Vicia villosa Roth
• root-associated microbiome

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Guilong Li and Zhongpei Li designed the experiment; Guilong Li, Pengfa Li, Kai Liu, and Jia Liu performed the experiments, Guilong Li, Pengfa Li, and Meng Wu analyzed the data; Guilong Li wrote the manuscript with contributions from other coauthors.

Data availability statement

All the Illumina 16S rRNA gene sequence data obtained in this study are available in the NCBI database under the BioProject accession number PRJNA723718: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ bioproject/ PRJNA723718. All other data are provided in the results section and the appendix of this article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41771298), the Key Research and Development Program of Jiangxi Province (No. 20203BBF63039), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province (No. 20202ACBL213007), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province BK20181510,BK20191511 (No. BK20181510; BK20191511).