Rotational diversity shapes the bacterial and archaeal communities and confers positive plant-soil feedback in winter wheat rotations
Nikolaos Kaloterakis, Adriana Giongo, Andrea Braun-Kiewnick, Mehdi Rashtbari, Priscilla Zamberlan, Bahar S. Razavi, Kornelia Smalla, Rüdiger Reichel, Nicolas Brüggemann
Kaloterakis N, Giongo A, Braun-Kiewnick A, Rashtbari M, Zamberlan P, Razavi BS, Smalla K, Reichel R, Brüggemann N (2025) Rotational diversity shapes the bacterial and archaeal communities and confers positive plant-soil feedback in winter wheat rotations. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 203: 109729.
DOI: 10.1016/j.soilbio.2025.109729
Unassembled raw amplicon data were deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under BioProject PRJNA942109
Plant-soil feedbacks drive productivity in winter wheat (WW; Triticum aestivum L.) rotations. Although this is a frequent observation, the underlying plant-soil-microbe interactions remain unclear. We aimed to investigate the effects of WW rotational positions on soil bacterial and archaeal communities, as well as nitrogen (N) cycling, as potential drivers of WW yield decline in successively-grown WW. WW following oilseed rape (W1; Brassica napus L.) was compared with WW in self-succession (W2) in a rhizotron study using agricultural soil with a sandy loam texture. Samples were collected at tillering and grain ripening. At tillering, we found a higher NO3− content in W1 soil, especially in the 60–100 cm subsoil layer, associated with the N-rich residues of the preceding oilseed rape crop, while this trend was reversed at grain ripening. Analysis of enzyme kinetics revealed an increase in leucine aminopeptidase activity in W1 and an increase in β-glucosidase activity in W2 at tillering, possibly related to the residue quality of the preceding crop. No differences in bacterial and archaeal alpha diversity were observed at both sampling times, but beta diversity showed a significant role of both rotational position and soil depth in shaping the microbial community. The gene copy numbers of amoA genes of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB), nifH and nirS were significantly higher in W2 compared to W1 at tillering, suggesting a strong effect of rotational position on N cycling of the following WW. The abundances of amoA (AOB) and nirS were also higher in W2 at grain ripening. Our results highlight the persistent soil legacy of the preceding crop on both nutrient cycling and bacterial and archaeal community composition, contributing to yield reduction in successively grown WW. Understanding plant-microbe interactions and keeping them at the center of productive WW rotations is, and will continue to be, critical to future agriculture.
This work was conducted within the RhizoWheat Project, project number 031B0910A (CAU), 031B0910B (Forschungszentrum Jülich), and 031B0910D (Julius Kühn Institute), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the Funding Program “Rhizo4Bio - Importance of the Rhizosphere for the Bioeconomy”. AG was funded through the 2018–2019 BiodivERsA3 ERA-Net COFUND program, and by the German Research Foundation (DFG, grant number SM 59/21–1).
https://www.rhizowheat.uni-kiel.de/de
https://www.julius-kuehn.de/en/ep
Submitted to WolV System (JKI) on 10.09.2024.
Submitted to Soil Biology and Biochemistry on 09.09.2024.
Accepted by Soil Biology and Biochemistry on 24.01.2025.