Effects of cotton straw amendment on soil fertility and microbial communities

Maintaining soil fertility, while controlling pollution from excessive chemical fertilizer application is important for keeping soil productivity of sustainable agriculture. Variety of straws have been used and proven to be good soil amendments for increasing soil organic matter (OM) and a range of additional soil nutrients. However, little is known about the utilization of cotton straw for soil amendment. To better understand the mechanism behind cotton straw soil amendments, investigations were performed upon cucumber seedlings, where changes to soil nutrients and microbial communities were investigated. The results revealed that the cotton straw application promoted the cucumber seedling growth by significantly increasing the soil OM, available nitrogen, available phosphorus, and available potassium. The concentration of cotton straw was positively correlated to both the number of the culturable microorganisms and also the total microbial biomass within soil. Furthermore, assessment of cotton straw application using Biolog metabolic profiling and phospholipid fatty acid analysis revealed that such application increased the microbial community metabolic activity, and markedly changed the structure of microbial community. 16S rRNA gene clone library construction and phylogenetic analysis of soil bacteria revealed gamma-Proteobacteria sequences dominated the cotton straw amendment soil, comprising 27.8% of the total number of analyzed sequences, while they were less represented in control soil (13.4%). On the contrary, the Sphingobacteria (7.8%) and Verrucomicrobia (2.4%) in the cotton straw amendment soil decreased after application when compared to the control soil 15.2% and 15.2%.