The diazotrophic community in oat rhizosphere: effects of legume intercropping and crop growth stage

Abstract

In this study, the abundance, diversity and structure of the diazotrophic community in oat rhizosphere soil in three cropping systems and at two oat growth stages were investigated using real-time PCR and Illumina MiSeq sequencing. The nifH gene abundance in oat-soybean intercropping (OSO) and oat-mungbean intercropping (OMO) was significantly greater than that in sole oat (O), but the nifH gene abundance significantly decreased at the later stage in all the treatments. Alpha diversity indices in OSO and OMO were higher at the heading stage, but lower at the maturity stage than that in O. Bradyrhizobium and Skermanella were the dominant genera identified in all samples, with an average proportion of 35.8% and 12.4%, respectively. The proportion of dominant genera showed significant differences and varied with cropping system and growth stage. Principal component analysis showed that growth stage had a stronger effect than intercropping on the diazotrophic community structure. However, Mantel test and redundancy analysis showed there was no environmental factor significantly correlated to the diazotrophic community structure. Our results demonstrate that intercropping had a weaker effect than growth stage on the abundance, diversity and structure of the diazotrophic community in oat rhizosphere soil.

Keywords

community composition / Illumina MiSeq sequencing / nifH gene / oat-legume intercropping / rhizosphere soil

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2018212 contains supplementary materials (Figs. S1–S2).

Acknowledgements

The work was funded by the China Agriculture Research System Project (CARS-08-B-1) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFD0300205-01).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Yadong Yang, Xiaomin Feng, Yuegao Hu, and Zhaohai Zeng declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)