Unveiling the Wheat Microbiome under Varied Agricultural Field Conditions

Abstract

Wheat being the important staple food crop plays a significant role in nutritional security. A wide variety of microbial communities beneficial to plants and contributing to plant health and production are found in the rhizosphere. The wheat microbiome encompasses an extensive variety of microbial species playing a key role in sustaining the physiology of the crop, nutrient uptake, and biotic/abiotic stress resilience. This report presents wheat microbiome analysis under six different farm practices, namely, organic (Org), timely sown (TS), wheat after pulse crop (WAPC), tem perature-controlled phenotyping facility (TCPF), maize-wheat cropping system (MW), and residue burnt field (Bur), using 16S rRNA sequencing methodology. The soil sam ples collected from either side of the wheat row were mixed to get a final sample set for DNA extraction under each condition. After the data preprocessing, microbial com munity analysis was performed, followed by functional analysis and annotation. An abundance of the phylum Proteobacteria was observed, followed by Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, andGemmatimonadetes in the majority of the samples, while relative abundance was found to vary at the genus level. Analysis against the Carbohydrate Active Enzymes (CAZy) database showed a high number of glycoside hydrolase genes in the TS, TCPF, and WAPC samples, while the Org, MW, and Bur samples predomi nantly had glycosyltransferase genes and carbohydrate esterase genes were in the low est numbers. Also, the Org and TCPF samples showed lower diversity, while rare and abundant species ranged from 12 to 25% and 20 to 32% of the total bacterial species in all the sets, respectively. These variations indicate that the different cropping sequence had a significant impact on soil microbial diversity and community composi tion, which characterizes its economic and environmental value as a sustainable agri cultural approach to maintaining food security and ecosystem health.