Artificial selection of phosphate solubilizing microbial communities

The aim of the study was to enhance the phosphate solubilization activity of a soil microbial community. To this end, we used two artificial selection techniques: environmental perturbation and propagation. The microbial communities were allowed to stabilize for 12 cycles, doing triplicates of the starting community, and a best and random performing community was selected to start the offspring generation. Afterwards, the communities selected by environmental perturbation were cycled for 10 cycles to reach stability, doing eight replicates per selected community. The communities selected by propagation were selected after each incubation based on their phosphate solubilization activity and propagated for 7 generations, doing 12 replicates for each selected community. The 16S rRNA partial gene amplicon sequencing was performed on all starting communities and selected communities.