PubMed · 2026-07-01
Which oat variety you plant matters more than which soil treatment you apply when it comes to shaping the underground microbial community in salty, alkaline farmland. A field experiment found that cultivar identity drove more variation in soil microbiome structure than bacterial agents, organic manure, or silica fume amendments, though organic inputs still produced the broadest shifts in nutrient-cycling genes.
Cultivar identity explained more variation in microbial community structure and beta diversity than any of the five amendment regimes tested.
Organic manure and the combination treatment (MIX3) produced the broadest shifts across carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur cycling gene modules, especially in soils associated with the TY60 cultivar.
Stochastic (random) processes dominated microbial assembly overall, but the mechanism differed by kingdom: bacteria were driven mainly by drift, archaea by homogeneous dispersal, and fungi by a roughly equal mix of both.
