eng Oriental Scientific Publishing Company Biosciences Biotechnology Research Asia 0973-1245 2016-09-25 13 3 1739 1747 10.13005/bbra/2325 15727 article Ghobad Jalali 1 Amir Lakzian 1 Alireza Astaraei 1 Aliakbar Haddad-Mashadrizeh 2 Mehdi Azadvar 3 Eisa Esfandiarpour 4 Department of Soil Science, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Department of Biology, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Department of Plant Protection, South Kerman Agricultural and Natural Resources Research and Education Center. Department of Soil Science, Vali-e-AsrUniversity of Rafsanjan. Assessment of soil microbial community composition in arid and semi-arid regions is an important issue. The aim of this work was to analyze and compare the bacterial communities in three different neighboring land uses (orchard, farmand shrub land) in arid-region soils located in southeast of Iran using molecular biology-based. The analysis of the denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis(DGGE) of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplified 16S rDNA fingerprints demonstrated that bacterial community composition in all land uses was different. Clustering analysis of the DGGE bands of 16S rDNAfragments revealed that bacteria in the three soil samples from each land use formed a separated cluster, indicating variation in species composition between land uses. However, the results showed that the species richness and Shannon-Wiener diversity index differed significantly among different land uses while Pielou's evenness index did not show any significant differences. These findings indicate that land use was one of the major factors in variation of species composition of soil bacterial communities. https://www.biotech-asia.org/vol13no3/effects-of-land-use-on-the-structural-diversity-of-soil-bacterial-communities-in-south-eastern-iran/ Soil bacterial communities; Structural diversity; Land use; DGGE; Arid-region