World of soil

The importance of soil cannot be stressed enough. Fundamentally, without it, we cannot grow the food we need to feed the world. Soils in different parts of the world and even from local region to local region differ enormously and understanding the composition of different soils, their structure, fungal, and microbial characteristics is vital to knowing how to get the best from this finite resource in a rapidly changing world.

Microbes play a significant role in maintaining soil fertility through the recycling of nutrients and influencing the bioavailability of those nutrients to plants, as well as altering soil structure and other characteristics of the soil.

Writing in the International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, a team from Japan has carried out a clustering analysis of the bacterial profile of soils from around the world. Their work builds a global picture of different soils and how the microbiome of different soils differs from place to place. Their work utilises data from various environments worldwide (23 countries and almost 5000 soil microbiome samples) and uses the microbiome database, the earth microbiome project (EMP) to build a picture of bacteria in soils from paddy fields, vineyards, grasslands, and forests. species, and it was not suitable for examining the microbial composition in a sample.

It was the development of next-generation DNA sequencing that facilitated microbiome analysis and allowed scientists to determine the taxonomic composition of samples without the need to isolate and culture microbial strains from the sample. Metagenomics has given us access to the very depths of the soil. The work offers many new insights from paddy field to Mongolian grassland.

“This research is expected to deepen the understanding of the ecology of the soil bacterial flora and lead to knowledge that will be vital for soil management based on bacteria,” the team writes.

Tanaka, T., Cruz, A.F., Ono, N. and Kanaya, S. (2022) ‘Clustering analysis of soil microbial community at global scale’, Int. J. Bioinformatics Research and Applications, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp.219–233.

Footnote: A citizen/farming science project is underway globally to determine the quality of soil based on how rapidly buried cotton underwear rots in a given patch. An important investigation for the sake of soil science that can be done anyone.