Looking for Rhizobacterial Ecological Indicators in Agricultural Soils Using 16S rRNA metagenomic Amplicon Data

摘要

IntroductionBiological communities present in soil are essential to sustainable and productive agricultural practices; however, an accurate determination of the ecological status of agricultural soils remains to date an elusive task. An ideal indicator should be pervasive, play a relevant role in the ecosystem, show a rapid and proportional answer to external perturbations and be easily and economically measurable. Rhizobacteria play a major role in determining soil properties, becoming an attractive candidate for the detection of ecological indicators. The application of massive sequencing technologies to metagenomic analysis is providing an increasingly more precise view of the structure and composition of soil communities. In this work, we analyse soil rhizobacterial composition under various stress levels to search for potential ecological indicators.