Impact of agricultural management, geographic origin, and cultivars of wheat on metabolic profiling and taxonomic composition of soil microbial communities

Abstract ID: 2133 / Poster Number: 050.15P Impact of agricultural management, geographic origin, and cultivars of wheat on metabolic profiling and taxonomic composition of soil microbial communities Presenting author: Manuela Costanzo, PhD, ENEA, Italian National Agency, Rome, Italy Co-authors: Filippo Sevi, Andrea Visca, Silvia Tabacchioni, Elisa Clagnan, Giulia Puzo, Antonio Molino, Massimo Reverberi, Claudia Zoani, Annamaria Bevivino Introduction: Soil microbiomes (SMs) are involved in all biogeochemical cycles, playing a key role in the turnover of organic matter and in the regulation of nutrient availability. Moreover, SMs play a key role also in climate change being responsible for the production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) which contribute to in global warming. There’s therefore the societal need to understand the best agronomic strategies to better preserve healthy soils and reduce GHGs emissions into the atmosphere. Objective: In the framework of the National Center for Agricultural Technologies (PNRR AGRITECH), soil samples were collected from Northern, Central and Southern Italy to investigate the impact of agricultural management, geographic origin and cultivars of Triticum durum (Td) and aestivum (Ta) on SMs communities. Method: Functional diversity was investigated by using the Biolog-ECOPlates™ system (Biolog Inc., USA), with average well color development (AWCD) indicating the level of microbial activity. To assess bacterial diversity and structure, the sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene was performed on the MinION (Oxford Nanopore) platform. Findings: Preliminary results show that Ta had higher metabolic fingerprint than Td (p<0.05). Further analysis shows that in Ta, management and geographic origin affect the metabolic activity of the microbiome (p<0.05), the same finding is not obtained in Td. Metagenomic analysis will allow us to validate the data obtained. Conclusion: Our study will allow us to analyze metabolic changes in the microbial community due to different management techniques and geographic origin of the wheat cultivar, identifying the abundance of different species in the central microbiome.