Functional diversity of soil microbial communities after 42 years of organic and conventional management

Soil microorganisms deliver numerous ecosystem functions essential for crop production. Changes in agricultural practices can alter soil microbial diversity and the underlying metabolic potential encoded in their genomes. To extend our knowledge of the long-term impact of farming systems on the functional diversity of soil microbes, we used the DOK system comparison trial (Therwil/CH) to compare an unfertilized control (NOFERT), two organic (BIODYN, BIOORG) and conventional (CONFYM, CONMIN) farming systems after 42 years of distinct management.Soil sampling was performed 3 times during spring 2019 under winter wheat, and extracted DNA of a total of 60 samples was used for shotgun sequencing on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 platform.Our results suggest that long-term organic and conventional management can promote soil microbiomes with unique genetic capacities that might ultimately alter key biogeochemical processes in agriculturally managed soils.