Resumo

The sugar cane is nowadays the most important crop in Brazil, mainly requested to feed the sugar and ethanol growing market. The increasing demand for these products is leading to the expansion of this culture to new areas. Considering this scenario, the search for sustainable alternatives is desirable and one of the pillars in this context would it be to better explore the role of the microbial communities to support a better plant development. Supplying it with nutrients or inhibiting the occurrence of diseases. However, little is known about the microbial community inhabiting the soils cultivated with sugarcane. In this way, this work aim to deeply describe the bacterial and archaeal diversity in soils cultivated with sugarcane, basing the inferences on a total of 279 physical and chemically characterized soil samples, collected 10 different areas with distinct managements of plantations. The use of culture-independent analyses, such as T-RFLP, qPCR and highthrouput sequencing of V6 region of the 16S rRNA gene, designed the scenario to reach our target. Our results revealed no distinction for the abundance and values of alpha diversity among samples, either for bacterial or archaeal analyses. The clustering of samples, based on TRFLP or V6 sequences, revealed for both groups the occurrence of three distinct major groups. The ordination of drivers explaining the dissimilarities among samples revealed occurrence of distance decay patterns (explaining 33% of variance), followed by the soils characteristics (15%) and the distinct practices adopted for the management of sugarcane plantations (14%). These results are the first insights that rely on a wider view of microbes present in the sugarcane fields and demonstrated the differential assemblies of such communities is mainly determined by the geographical distance among samples.