Molecular Soil Biology 2026, Vol.17, No.1, 26-37 http://bioscipublisher.com/index.php/msb 32 producers are required to provide classification identification and safety evaluation materials, and to set requirements for indicators such as the effective viable bacteria count, the rate of contaminants, and the limit of heavy metals in the product. This means that in the development of tea garden phosphorus-solubilizing agents, not only the promoting effect needs to be proven, but also the stability and non-harmfulness under carrier, storage, transportation, and application conditions, as well as the long-term impact on the local microbial network, the activation of heavy metals, and ecological risks need to be evaluated (Pilotto et al., 2025). 7 Case Study: Functional Verification of Dominant Phosphate-Solubilizing Bacteria in a Typical Acidic Tea Garden 7.1 Overview of the study area and sampling design Taking the Wuyi Rock Tea production area as an example, a study was conducted in the Wuyi Mountain region of Fujian Province. Root zone soil samples were collected from tea plants (the latitude and longitude coordinates, soil layer depth, and the operation of avoiding fertilization points were provided in the report), and samples from different tea plant varieties' root zones were used as separation sources. This reflects the typical sampling logic under the background of "acidic mountainous tea garden-yellow-red soil-high precipitation": extracting functional bacteria in the micro-environment most influenced by the root system to improve the screening efficiency (Figure 2) (Ma et al., 2025; Pokharel et al., 2025). The key points of this design lie in the uniform sampling depth and root zone definition, recording the variety and management history, and conducting simultaneous measurements of soil pH, exchangeable acidity/aluminum, available phosphorus, and organic matter, providing a baseline for subsequent explanation of "bacterial strain function-environmental adaptability". Figure 2 Schematic diagram of phosphate-solubilizing microorganisms improving red soil and crop growth (Adopted from Pokharel et al., 2025) 7.2 Selection of advantageous strains andin vitro verification of phosphorus-depleting capacity In the in vitro verification stage, a combination of "solid transparent circle preliminary screening + liquid quantitative re-screening" is commonly used: first, colonies that produce obvious phosphorus-depleting rings are selected from the solid medium containing insoluble phosphorus, and then the phosphorus content is quantitatively determined using colorimetry in the liquid culture system, while simultaneously recording the pH changes in the culture medium to assist in judging the contribution of "acidification phosphorus depletion" (Joshi et al., 2023; Aguennouz et al., 2025). In the case of the root zone isolation from Wuyishan, researchers selected a small number of bacteria capable of degrading inorganic phosphorus from dozens of isolates, and preliminarily identified the advantageous strains through 16S rRNA homology comparison to the Paenibacillus genus (with
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjQ4ODYzNA==