The global commercial cultivation of transgenic crops, including glyphosate-tolerant soybean, has increased widely in recent decades with potential impact on the environment. The bulk of previous studies showed different results on the effects of the release of transgenic plants on the soil microbial community, especially rhizosphere bacteria. In this study, comparative analyses of the bacterial communities in the rhizosphere soils and surrounding soils were performed between the glyphosate-tolerant soybean line NZL06-698 (or simply N698), containing a glyphosate-insensitive EPSPS gene, and its control cultivar Mengdou12 (or simply MD12), by a 16S ribosomal RNA gene (16S rDNA) amplicon sequencing-based Illumina MiSeq platform. No statistically significant difference was found in the overall alpha diversity of the rhizosphere bacterial communities, although the species richness and evenness of the bacteria increased in the rhizosphere of N698 compared with that of MD12. Some influence on phylogenetic diversity of the rhizosphere bacterial communities was found between N698 and MD12 by beta diversity analysis based on weighted UniFrac distance. Furthermore, the relative abundances of part rhizosphere bacterial phyla and genera, which included some nitrogen-fixing bacteria, were significantly different between N698 and MD12. Our present results indicate some impact of the glyphosate-tolerant soybean line N698 on the phylogenetic diversity of rhizosphere bacterial communities together with a significant difference in the relative abundances of part rhizosphere bacteria at different classification levels as compared with its control cultivar MD12, when a comparative analysis of surrounding soils between N698 and MD12 was used as a systematic contrast study.
Keywords: 16S ribosomal RNA gene; Illumina MiSeq; Soil; glyphosate-tolerant soybean; rhizosphere bacterial community; systematic contrast study.