Cover crop impacts on cash crop microbiome in semi-arid agricultural soil

This study aimed to assess the effect that cover crop microbiome selection pressure has on the cash crop microbiome of a cotton cropping system on the semi-arid Southern High Plains, USA. Three treatments were implemented in a conventional cropping system in Lubbock, TX, no-tillage with a winter wheat cover crop, no-tillage winter fallow, and conventional tillage winter fallow. The cover crop and no-tillage was implemented in Nov. 2014, and the sampling for this project occurred in June and August of 2018, 2019, and 2020. Each tillage regime was replicated three times in the field. All three replicates were sampled at each sampling point to a depth of 10 cm, samples collected randomly from the center row of the 4-row plot, within 15 cm of the cash crop stem. Amplicon sequencing was conducted to generate 100000 paired-end reads per sample for both 16S rRNA and ITS using the SWIFT library protocol.