Dora Feng

CV / Research Experiences

Current Research Interests

Soil acidification is a natural process under subtropical climatic conditions with high temperature and high precipitation. In the past decades, overuse of nitrogen (N) fertilizers, especially in the form of urea or ammonium (NH₄⁺), has intensified the acidification process. An over 10 years long term outsaid experiment shows that organic materials, such as swine manure as amendments have been reported to ameliorate acidic soils. While the crop straw amendment has shown a negative trend to ameliorate the acidity of the red soil. Therefore,the conversion of straw to organic fertilizer is the most widely used strategy.

Here in my PhD project, I hypothesized that crop straw would ameliorate soil acidification through transabdominal transformation from four progress . First, depending on the substrates fed to Protaetia brevitarsis Lewis, physicochemical properties of the residues may strongly differ, which results in distinct effects on soil fertility. Second, the straw decomposition process may also enrich and cultivate a large number of beneficial bacteria. Third, the larvae influences the soil bacterial community's composition and diversity through frass deposits and gut bacteria. Lastly, the application rates of frass have a significant impact on the soil microbial community. To test this hypothesis, I obtained some data of Mid & Hind gut metagenome, transcriptomics and metabonomics of Protaetia brevitarsis under different treatments. The aim was to investigate the potential of the novel organic fertilizer to impact the plant-associated soil microbiome and mechanisms behind observed changes. This study are crucial for a more efficient application and valorization of the frass, from both agronomical and environmental point of view.