Bacterial community of agricultural soils used for potato cultivation in Sverdlovsk region

The yield of potatoes and other crops is influenced by many factors, one of the most important is the complex condition of the soil. Soil research more often focuses on the determination of its physical and chemical properties, but rarely takes into account the bacterial community and its diversity. In this work, the bacterial microbiota of soils cultivated with potato was evaluated. Using metabarcoding and full-fragment sequencing of the 16S rRNA site, by nanopore sequencing, primary screening of the bacterial community of fields in three administrative districts of the Sverdlovsk region: the city of Yekaterinburg, Beloyarsky and Sysertsky districts was carried out in 2022. As a result, 2371 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified to the species level. More than half of the relative bacterial abundance is occupied by the phylum Proteobacteria. Three orders represent more than one-third of the total bacterial community: Burkholderiales, Hyphomicrobiales, and Acidobacteriales. The most common bacterial genera in cultivated agricultural soils of the Sverdlovsk region are Bradyrhizobium, Massilia, Gaiella, Sphingomonas, Lysobacter and Gemmatimonas. The obtained results of alpha- and beta-diversity analysis allow us to conclude that, despite the statistically significant difference in the number of detected OTUs between some fields, there is no difference in their diversity by study objects in the administrative districts of the Sverdlovsk region.