Soil microbial community response to sustainable biofertilizer application based on pot experiment. soil metagenome

Banana production has been severely hindered by Fusarium wilt disease. The biofertilizer application has been proposed as a strategy for management of this soil borne disease. A four seasonal pot experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of sustainable biofertilizer application at low and high level on banana Fusarium wilt disease suppression, soil chemical property and microbial community. Results showed that the disease was effectively controlled after sustainable bofertilizer application, especially at high level. Next generation sequencing of 16S rRNA and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) genes on MiSeq platform revealed that a total of 202,029 reads for 16S and 282,174 reads for fungal ITS were successfully paired after basic quality control and Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Proteobacteria and Ascomycota were the most abundant bacterial and fungal phyla across all samples. The soil bacterial and fungal community for treatment amended with high level biofertilizer (HBIO) was significantly differed to treatments amended with low level biofertilizer (LBIO) and only chemical fertilizer (CF) as revealed by principal coordinate analysis. Moreover, the abundance of Firmicutes and Bacillus was significantly increased, while the abundance of Acidobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Ascomycota was significantly depleted in the HBIO treatment compared with the CF treatment. Furthermore, the abundance of Fusarium, a causal pathogen for Fusarium wilt disease, was significantly reduced in the HBIO treatment compared with the CF control and was slightly reduced (not significant) compared with the LBIO treatment. Pearson correlation and redundancy analysis showed that the abundance of Firmicutes and the soil pH, total nitrogen and carbon and available P were higher in HBIO treatment and they were all positively correlated with disease suppression. Cumulatively, the reduced Fusarium wilt disease incidence that was seen after biofertilizer was applied for might be attributed to the general suppression based on a shift within the soil microbial community.