Semi-arid soil metatranscriptomes under no-tillage and cover crop management systems

Semi-arid agricultural production systems are affected by high wind erosion, low fertility, and low soil carbon. Converting conventionally tilled systems to no-tillage and introducing a cover crop during the fallow period are often suggested to alleviate these conductions. Previously, we showed that cover cropping can refine the structure of the microbial community. In this study we examined the impact of cover cropping and no-tillage on microbial gene expression. We sequenced the metatranscriptomes of three production systems with varying levels of conservation management: conventional tillage winter fallow, no-tillage winter fallow, and no-tillage with a winter wheat cover crop.Soil samples were collected in August of 2019 and 2020. Within each plot, four soil samples were collected roughly 10 cm from the base of the cotton plant row, between rows 2 and 3. Samples were collected using 2.5 cm hand probes to a depth of 10 cm and homogenized. Soil samples were flash frozen using liquid N and stored under dry ice until transport to a -80C freezer for storage until RNA extraction.Total soil RNA was extracted from each sample using a Qiagen RNeasy PowerSoil Total RNA kit with slight modifications and purified using a RNeasy PowerClean Pro CleanUP kit. Library preparation and sequencing were conducted at the Texas A&M Institute for Genome Science and Society. Ribosomal RNA was not removed prior to sequencing due to low RNA extraction yields. Library preparation for RNAseq was conducted according to the TruSeq Stranded Total RNA protocol (Illumina Inc., CA, USA) with slight modification and RNA sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000.