Microbial diversity is one of the important microbial parameters that would reflect the fertility and health of soil. The effect of inorganic (conventional) farming on soil microbial structure and function is not very definite as yet. Organic farming is known to improve soil microbial diversity and leads to sustainability. Bacterial community structure of short term organic and inorganic farm soil was studied using culture independent approach and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis. The species richness, diversity and the distribution of bacterial species improved in organic farming, but the change is subtle. We expect that this difference will be significant under long term application of organics.
Organic farming, metagenomics, diversity, denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis
© The Author(s) 2015. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.