Soil microbial community composition changes according to the tillage practice and plant development stage

Agricultural practices have a strong impact on soil bacterial and fungal community composition. Furthermore, microbial community composition can change with the stage of plant development. We are interested in exploring these effects in relation to changes induced by agriculture (conventional and reduced tillage) and plant stage (germination and flowering) in soil conditions. Here, instead of examining this impact at a high taxonomic level such as phylum and/or class, thus missing potentially relevant information from lower levels, we propose an original method: exploiting the available sequence information at the lowest taxonomic level attainable for each operational taxonomic unit. Results show that some microbial communities were impacted only by the tillage practice , while others were impacted only by the stage of plant. Changes in microbial community composition could be due to the soil conditions induced by the soil practice and the stage of plant.