Molecular Soil Biology 2026, Vol.17, No.1, 26-37 http://bioscipublisher.com/index.php/msb 26 Research Insight Open Access Analysis of the Diversity and Functional Potential of Phosphate-Solubilizing Bacteria in Acidic Tea Garden Soil LianChen1, Lianming Zhang2 1 Institute of Life Sciences, Jiyang Colloge of Zhejiang A&F University, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China 2 Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Center, Cuixi Academy of Biotechnology, Zhuji, 311800, China Corresponding email: lianming.zhang@jicat.org Molecular Soil Biology, 2026, Vol.17, No.1 doi: 10.5376/msb.2026.17.0003 Received: 03 Jan., 2025 Accepted: 05 Feb., 2026 Published: 18 Feb., 2026 Copyright © 2026 Chen and Zhang, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Chen L., and Zhang L.M., 2026, Analysis of the diversity and functional potential of phosphate-solubilizing bacteria in acidic tea garden soil, Molecular Soil Biology, 17(1): 26-37 (doi: 10.5376/msb.2026.17.0003) Abstract Acidic tea garden soils generally exhibit low pH, abundant aluminum-iron oxides, and easily leachable base ions, which result in the adsorption of phosphorus on mineral surfaces or its precipitation with metal ions, thereby "fixing" the available phosphorus and keeping it in a restricted state for a long time. Faced with this bottleneck, phosphate-solubilizing bacteria promote the dissolution of inorganic phosphorus and the mineralization of organic phosphorus through secreting organic acids, chelating metals, and producing phosphatases, making them an important microbial resource for improving the efficient utilization of phosphorus in tea gardens. In recent years, high-throughput sequencing, functional gene markers (such as phoD, gcd/pqq), and metagenomics have advanced our understanding of the community structure and functional potential of phosphate-solubilizing bacteria, particularly revealing that soil acidification can significantly alter the phoD carrying community and reduce the phosphorus activation ability. Based on the analysis of the phosphorus availability limitation mechanism in acidic tea garden soils, this paper comprehensively discusses the diversity pattern, molecular mechanism, and environmental driving factors of phosphate-solubilizing bacteria, and further evaluates the selection of dominant strains, the development of microbial agents, and the requirements for ecological safety. It proposes a research prospect of multi-omics integration and precise microbial regulation. Keywords Acidic tea garden soil; Phosphorus availability; Phosphate-solubilizing bacteria; phoD; gcd/pqq; Metagenomics; PICRUSt2; Microbial inoculant 1 Introduction Tea plants prefer an acidic environment. The suitable pH range is generally considered to be 4.5-5.5; however, in production, long-term single application or excessive application of chemical fertilizers, strong rainfall leaching and terrain runoff processes can easily cause further acidification of tea garden soil and an increase in exchangeable aluminum and a decline in the base ion pool, thereby affecting nutrient supply and microbial processes. Comprehensive analysis of tea garden soil at the national scale indicates that more than half of the samples have a pH outside the "optimal range" for tea plants, and acidification and nutrient imbalance have become common problems restricting the construction of high-quality tea gardens (Ding et al., 2021). Tea plants also have strong tolerance to aluminum and enrichment characteristics. They can maintain growth in an acidic-aluminum environment, and the chemical environment in the rhizosphere is more prone to change, making tea gardens a typical farmland ecosystem for studying the coupling relationship of "acidification-aluminum-phosphorus-microorganisms". The concentration of inorganic phosphorus in soil solution is usually low. A large amount of phosphorus exists in the form of mineral adsorption or precipitation, and its mobility and biological availability are determined by the dynamic equilibrium of adsorption/desorption and precipitation/dissolution (Zeng et al., 2024). Under acidic conditions, phosphorus is more likely to undergo coordination exchange with the surfaces of iron and aluminum oxides, or form insoluble compounds with Fe and Al; at the same time, soil organic phosphorus needs to be released by microbial phosphatase hydrolysis, and acidification may alter the related microbial communities and enzyme activities, thereby exacerbating the deficiency of available phosphorus (Wan et al., 2025; Zhang et al., 2025).
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