2026-10-06T09:44:20Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34037382 2026-10-01T16:12:28Z category_24358 category_26983 category_24127 portal_421 item_type_8 month_year_10_2026

<b>EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF A “MICROBIAL HANDSHAKE” THROUGH SHARED COMMUNITIES OF CASH AND COVER CROPS IN CORN-SOYBEAN ROTATIONS IN A COMMON GARDEN GREENHOUSE EXPERIMENT</b> Raven Marie Lewis (25147212) Microbial ecology Soil biology Other agricultural, veterinary and food sciences not elsewhere classified Agronomy Soil microbes Plant microbe interactions Root exudates Casparian strip Microbial ecology Cover crops Corn Soybean <p dir="ltr">Cover cropping offers several benefits to farmers, but many accrue slowly, so cost-benefit analyses can appear unfavorable in the short term. One potentially unquantified benefit is the capacity of cover crops to sustain plant-growth-promoting microbes that the following cash crop can recruit, a process we frame as a “microbial handshake.” We asked whether the rhizosphere and root bacterial communities recruited by four cover crop species (cereal rye, winter wheat, hairy vetch, and Balansa clover) were also recruited by corn and soybean in a common garden greenhouse experiment inoculated with field soil. We evaluated whether the potential for a handshake depended on relatedness between Poaceae and Fabaceae families (e.g., legume-legume, legume-grass, and grass-grass) and on adjacency within four crop rotation sequences (e.g., corn → cereal rye → soybean → hairy vetch). Bulk soil, rhizosphere, and rhizoplane-endophyte compartments were profiled by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing at two plant developmental stages (early vegetative and early reproductive), alongside two root traits expected to shape microbial recruitment: total organic carbon of root exudation and root suberization. Of the rhizoplane-endophyte plant-associated phylotypes, 37.9% were shared by two or more species and all fifteen species pairs shared more than expected by chance, indicating that host-specific filtering does not preclude a handshake. Within this compartment, overlap was greater between related species (odds ratio = 1.73) but was not predicted by rotation adjacency, TOC exudation, or suberization extent. By contrast, rhizosphere communities were essentially non-overlapping among species, and compartment was the strongest determinant of overall community composition (20.5% of variance). Throughout, species identity outperformed the grass/legume distinction. Because plants were grown in parallel rather than in rotation, these results establish that a handshake is possible, motivating a following field rotation trial.</p> 2026-10-01T16:12:28Z Text Thesis 10.25394/PGS.34037382.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/_b_EXPLORING_THE_POTENTIAL_OF_A_MICROBIAL_HANDSHAKE_THROUGH_SHARED_COMMUNITIES_OF_CASH_AND_COVER_CROPS_IN_CORN-SOYBEAN_ROTATIONS_IN_A_COMMON_GARDEN_GREENHOUSE_EXPERIMENT_b_/34037382 CC BY 4.0 Open Access after 2027-10-01