Manure Microbial Communities and Resistance Profiles Reconfigure after Transition to Manure Pits and Differ from Those in Fertilized Field Soil
Kimberley V. Sukhum, Rhiannon C. Vargas, Manish Boolchandani, Alaric W. D’Souza, Sanket Patel, Akhil Kesaraju, Gretchen Walljasper, Harshad Hegde, Zhan Ye, Robert K. Valenzuela, Paul Gunderson, Casper G. Bendixsen, Gautam Dantas, Sanjay K. Shukla
Abstract
The addition of dairy cow manure-stored in manure pits-to field soil has the potential to introduce not only organic nutrients but also mammalian microbial communities and antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) to soil communities. Using shotgun sequencing paired with functional metagenomics, we showed that microbial community composition changed between fresh manure and manure pit samples with a decrease in gut-associated pathobionts, while ARG abundance and diversity remained high. However, field soil communities were distinct from those in manure in both microbial taxonomic and ARG composition. These results broaden our understanding of the transfer of microbial communities in agricultural settings and suggest that field soil microbial communities are resilient against the deposition of ARGs or microbial communities from manure.