Detecting soil microbiome associated with N2O flows to sugarcane fields

Abstract

Here, we present a plan for an abroad research internship, which it is complementary to the ongoing postdoctoral project (FAPESP 2015/21893-9) and FAPESP regular project (2015/23186-8) coordinated by my Brazilian supervisor. For this internship we propose two main activities, first: use the bioinformatics platform and know-how from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (MIT) to analyse the data generated in our experiments conducted in Brazil, and second: we propose an additional experiment for the analysis of the diazotrophic microbial community of the soil able fixing 15N2 to the soil.Therefore, the first objective is the analysis of the sequencing data set, i.e., amplicons, from the sugarcane field microbiome. The sequences are being obtained from field experiments with sugarcane treated with different methods of nitrogen fertilizer application. Bioinformatics tools will be used to process and annotate the sequences, and statistical software for comparison and interpretation of the data will be used. The second objective is to perform a new experiment to be run at MIT, in order to assess the effect of diazotrophic microbial community of the able fixing 15N2 to the soil borne. This second objective will add a new dimension to the original ongoing project including the analysis of the free living fixing N2, which was not initially planned, but represents an important contribution to achieve the overall objective of the project and a potential strategy to N2O mitigation by reduce N fertilizer application. In conclusion, the approval of this proposal will significantly foster the identification of potential microbial groups in the soil system of sugarcane fields that is related to reduced nitrogen fertilizer application. Furthermore, diazotrophic community potentially supply substantial amounts of biologically fixed nitrogen to crops, but their occurrence may be suppressed by high nitrogen fertilizer application. Here, we explored the impact of low and high nitrogen fertilizer rates on the presence of diazotrophic in soil from sugarcane cultivated for decades in Brazil. (AU)