Harnessing the power of microbes: Enhancing soybean growth in an acidic soil through AMF inoculation rather than P-fertilization

Abstract

The low phosphorus (P) availability of acidic soils severely limits leguminous plant growth and productivity. Improving the soil P nutritional status can be achieved by increasing the P-content through P-fertilization or stimulating the mineralization of organic P via arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) application; however, their corresponding impacts on plant and soil microbiome still remain to be explored. Here, we examined the effects of AMF-inoculation and P-fertilization on the growth of soybean with different P-efficiencies, as well as the composition of rhizo-microbiome in an acidic soil. The growth of recipient soybean NY-1001, which has a lower P-efficiency, was not significantly enhanced by AMF-inoculation or P-fertilization. However, the plant biomass of higher P-efficiency transgenic soybean PT6 was significantly increased by 46.74%-65.22% through AMF-inoculation. Although there was no discernible difference in plant biomass between PT6 and NY-1001 in the absence of AMF-inoculation and P-fertilization, PT6 had approximately 1.9-2.5 times the plant biomass of NY-1001 after AMF-inoculation. Therefore, the growth advantage of higher P-efficiency soybean was achieved through the assistance of AMF rather than P-fertilization in available P-deficient acidic soil. Most nitrogen (N)-fixing bacteria and some functional genes related to N-fixation were abundant in endospheric layer, as were the P-solubilizing Pseudomonas plecoglossicida, and annotated P-metabolism genes. These N-fixing and P-solubilizing bacteria were positive correlated with each other. Lastly, the two most abundant phytopathogenic fungi species accumulated in endospheric layer, they exhibited positive correlations with N-fixing bacteria, but displayed negative interactions with the majority of the other dominant non-pathogenic genera with potential antagonistic activity.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32101383, 42377327), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2023 T160299, 2022 M711562, 2023 M731604), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Bureau of Science and Technology (BK20230787), and the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University from the Ministry of Education of China (IRT_14R27).

Author contributions

Conceptualization and methodology: Y.Y., Z.W., and G.L.; validation and investigation: Z.W., M.Y., A.F., H.H., and H.L.; material supply: Y.Y., Y.Z., and S.Y.; software, data curation and formal analysis: Z.W., M.Y., A.F., H.H., H.L., T.Y., Y.Z., S.Y., K.N., S.S., and J.Q.; writing and visualization: Y.Y., G.L., Z.W., M.Y., A.F., and H.H.; supervision, project administration and funding acquisition: Y.Y., Z.W., and M.Y. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The accession numbers of all clean sequencing data are PRJNA884153 (https://dataview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/object/PRJNA884153?reviewer=ub3bpmjrfu97gbdc173vjc7ev6) and PRJNA884158 (https://dataview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/object/PRJNA884158?reviewer = 7pfttkrp8cpbnpi1ssguot7gho).

Conflict of interests

This study did not involve endangered species. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data is available at Horticulture Research online.

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