Agricultural soils, pesticides and microbial diversity.

Pesticide effects on microbial community structure and activity in soil are reviewed, showing that methodological developments within the past few years have generated new possibilities for assessing pesticide effects. The first example is the use of mRNA quantification showing that nitrification processes are indeed very susceptible to some pesticides, and that there is correlation between the mRNA transcript quantity and the nitrification rate. The second example is devoted to pesticides influencing microbial community structures. The emergence of high throughput sequencing techniques now allows a more detailed analysis of which bacterial species are influenced.