Agriculture and environment
Case stories
Enhanced farming through practices that improve soil life
At the Danish @Innovation Centre for Organic Farming, @Tove Mariegaard Pedersen is heading the project “The Microbial Community of the Field”, aiming to understand how different farming practices and soil properties affect and shape the soil microbiome. During the last 3 years samples have been collected across more than 100 fields, and each sample has been analysed for detailed information on the soil microbiome.
Biomcare is proud to be engaged in this important endeavour, applying different microbiome sequencing solutions for the collected samples, and performing custom bioinformatic and statistical analyses. By relating the detailed data collected for each field to the soil microbiome, we evaluate how factors such as soil texture, pH, phosphor levels, organic material and tilling shape the soil microbiome.
A new project continues the activities, with more data to process, more findings to interpret and new samples to collect. This project is exactly what is needed to provide data-supported insight and guidelines that can promote sustainable farming and a healthy soil.
Decoding the Coral Microbiome: Insights from the Caribbean Reefs amidst a SCTLD Outbreak
We had the pleasure in the first part of 2023 to work with Dr. ANNE A.M.J. BECKER, at the ROSS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF VETERINARY MEDICINE. Dr. Becker has this amazing dataset where the bacterial microbiome was analyzed in coral samples collected of the reefs off St Kitts, in the Caribbean.
As the worlds coral reefs experience rapid decline and disease outbreaks, there is an urgent need to understand the important role of the associated microbiome.
This project, originally set out as a longitudinal baseline study with bi-weekly sampling of seemingly healthy colonies, took a new turn as Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) emerged on the reef. As a result, longitudinal microbiome data was generated covering the period where disease emerged, resulting in the rare opportunity to study and to potentially identify early microbiome perturbations.
It has been a pleasure to support with statistical analyses of this great dataset with all its specific requirements for the statistical design. In these months Dr. Becker is presenting the results at the Scientific Meeting of the Association of Marine Laboratories (AMLC) and the European Coral Reef Symposium.
Soil microbes help to explain maize yield differences across a field
A filed used for organic maize production gave highly varying yields and the organization using the field wanted to understand what differed in the soil between the good and bad sections. They collected a range of information about the soil in the different sections including nutrient content, soil type and humus content, and they collected soil samples for microbiome profiling.
The soil samples underwent sequencing, and then extensive bioinformatic processing to take the raw DNA sequences and turn it into tables showing, for each sample, the abundance of >1000 species and >1 million microbial functions. The tables were then used in statistical analysis to identify how both species and functions differed between the sections and how the differences associated with soil type, nutrient content, humus and water content.
They could identify both specific species and microbial functions that associated with good yield, but also got insight into how other factors of the soil such as soil type and water content, was important for the microbe diversity and Fungi/bacteria ratio.
How to implement the use of biostimulants to improve nutrient content of vegetables?
A organics farmer wanted not to only focus on the yield but also on nutrient content of her vegetables. She read about a biostimulant that should improve the nutrient content and wanted to test if it worked in her production.
She tried to apply the product to some sections and not to others and send the vegetables for nutrient testing. She could have stopped there, but since the biostimulant should work via the soil’s microbes, she wanted to see how the soil microbe profiles were affected by the product and if this factor was important to the outcome.
So, she collected soil samples before and after applying the product, and send them for microbiome analysis, ordering the full package with bioinformatics and statistical analysis. She also collected information on soil type, humus, nutrient levels etc.
By doing so, she could find out not only if the biostimulant improved the nutrient content, but also understand what factors dictated when applying biostimulant would improve the nutrient content and when it would not, allowing her to use the biostimulant in a more cost-effective manner.
