Potato soil core microbiomes are regionally variable across the continental US

Abstract

Soil microbiomes play crucial roles in pathogen suppression, nutrient mobilization, and maintenance of plant health. Their complexity and variability across spatial and temporal scales provide challenges for identifying common targets–microbial taxa or assemblages–for management in agricultural systems. To understand how microbiomes in potato production soils vary across growing regions and identify commonly distributed taxa among them, we compiled a continental-scale bacterial and eukaryotic amplicon dataset of over 1300 communities with corresponding edaphic measurements from nine US field sites. Field site explained most of the variance across bacterial and eukaryotic (predominantly fungal) communities, while pH, organic matter, and NPK concentrations also varied with community structure. Bacterial and eukaryotic potato soil microbiomes show consistent phylum-level composition across locations at the continental scale, with regional-scale differences evident among genera and amplicon sequence variants (ASVs). Core community analysis identified 606 bacterial and 74 eukaryotic ASVs that were present, but unequally distributed, across all nine field sites. Many of these core ASVs belong to common soil genera, such as Bacillus and Mortierella, which may reveal functional potential involved in maintaining soil health across regionally variable soil systems.