Unravelling the mechanisms underlying health and productivity promoting agricultural practices by fine-mapping rhizosphere communities

Plant species shape their own rhizosphere community, and on its turn selected soil biota shape the growth and development of plants. By making optimal use of the possibilities offered by specific qPCRs & next generation sequencing, we will characterize the bacterial and fungal community and their main predators (protozoa, bacterivorous- and fungivorous nematodes) in the rhizosphere of five crops. We hypothesize that so far poorly-understood positive effects of relatively simple soil management measures propagated in integrative and organic farming can be explained by ecologically interpretable shifts in the rhizosphere microbiome.

. Organic amendment (OA) has stronger effect than inorganic addition on soil food web.
. OA steers more complex microbe-eukaryote associations than mineral fertilization.
. OA strengths diverse microbe-eukaryote associations as survival, predation and cooperation.
. Bulk soil food web associations are more pronounced when considering soil factors.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.133885

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49854-y
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49854-y