<b>EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF A “MICROBIAL HANDSHAKE” THROUGH SHARED COMMUNITIES OF CASH AND COVER CROPS IN CORN-SOYBEAN ROTATIONS IN A COMMON GARDEN GREENHOUSE EXPERIMENT</b>

One potentially unquantified benefit is the capacity of cover crops to sustain plant-growth-promoting microbes that the following cash crop can recruit, a process we frame as a “microbial handshake.” We asked whether the rhizosphere and root bacterial communities recruited by four cover crop species (cereal rye, winter wheat, hairy vetch, and Balansa clover) were also recruited by corn and soybean in a common garden greenhouse experiment inoculated with field soil.

We evaluated whether the potential for a handshake depended on relatedness between Poaceae and Fabaceae families (e.g., legume-legume, legume-grass, and grass-grass) and on adjacency within four crop rotation sequences (e.g., corn → cereal rye → soybean → hairy vetch). Bulk soil, rhizosphere, and rhizoplane-endophyte compartments were profiled by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing at two plant developmental stages (early vegetative and early reproductive), alongside two root traits expected to shape microbial recruitment: total organic carbon of root exudation and root suberization.