RESUMO
Objective: To characterize rhizospheric microbial flora of Hunyuan Astragali Mongolici Radix (HAMR) and to provide scientific evidence for understanding quality formation of the herb. Methods: The soil microbial flora were fingerprinted by automated ribosomal intergenic-spacer analysis (ARISA). The raw data were processed and analyzed by GeneMarker and PAST, respectively. Results: Compared with non-rhizospheric soil flora, the rhizospheric flora from 2-and 3-year-old herbs shifted obviously, and the similarities were decreased but diversities increased. Meanwhile, the flora from 5-year-old herbs had no significant similarity difference to non-rhizospheric ones and their sample rare fraction curves were more consistent with each other. When compared to the ones from other production areas, the flora from HAMR had relatively lower core OTUs but had significantly higher abundance of core OTUs shared by all areas. Conclusion: The structure of rhizospheric microbial flora of HAMR is associated with the herb's age and is quite different from thoes from other areas.