PRJNA178180
PAMPA Dataset: Argentinean agricultural pampean soils Metagenome
Soil microbial communities are among the most diverse and complex environments in the world. Our information about the identity and metabolic capabilities of terrestrial microbes is still scarce. Moreover, although microorganisms in soil are essential for nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous and sulfur cycling as well as plant growth and crop production, only a few microbial species involved in these processes have been described in detail. The future years will face the challenge of increasing agricultural yields conserving soil microbial communities and soil quality. To do so, a better comprehension of micro-ecosystem functioning and microbial description will be needed. As a first modest approach towards the understanding of soil microbial communities and how land use affects them, we have generated a metagenomic dataset obtained by high throughput sequencing of samples from Argentinean Pampas. Three different geographic regions, three different types of land uses and two soil types (bulk and rhizospheric) were analyzed using whole genome shotgun (WGS) and amplicon sequencing. A total of 19 Mi (7.7 Gb) WGS reads and over 1 Mi 16 rRNA pyrotags were generated. Our preliminary results suggest that soil microbial communities are different at both, taxonomic and metabolic level, on each type of tillage system and geographic region in bulk soils. Rhizospheric microbial communities resulted markedly different from those in bulk soils and less sensitive to the type of tillage system. This dataset is the first soil metagenomic study in Argentina and one of the few available in the world. This should be considered as a kick-start for future efforts towards a better comprehension of soil microbial communities in agricultural systems in the Argentinean region and a useful comparison dataset for other regions in the world.