Metagenomic of microbial communities in agricultural soils under organic and conventional management systems.

Sustainable soil management requires considering both its physical-chemical characteristics and the characteristics of the biological communities that inhabit it. Traditionally, the biological component of agricultural soils has been less studied than the physical and chemical components, despite the enormous potential contained in soil biology to increase the sustainability of crops. In this project we propose to characterize the composition of microbial communities of soils under contrasting agricultural production systems regarding the exploitation of the biological activity of the soil using metagenomic. Specifically, we propose: 1) Determine differences in the composition of microbial communities in the soils of the two systems and 2) Identify members of these communities of interest for the development of agricultural and biotechnological applications. Metagenomics is a relatively simple and highly productive technique in the generation of data that allows analyzing entire communities of organisms in an integral way. To integrately analyze and interpret the results, we form an interdisciplinary team of researchers with experience in soil science, microbiology, biotechnology, agroecology and crop production. The scientific impacts of work are the deepening of knowledge about the relationships between soil biology and crop production and the discovery of organisms of interest to agriculture and biotechnology. Economic, socially and environmentally, the results of the proposed work will help in the design of sustainable and profitable crop production systems for agricultural producers. The requested funds from the DIUC in this proposal ($ 56925.55) will be used for the collection of samples, extraction, purification and massive sequencing of metagenomic DNA, bioinformatic analysis and dissemination. The proposed execution time is 24 months.

13th UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PROJECT COMPETITION