A long-term field experiment demonstrates the influence of tillage on the bacterial potential to produce soil structure-stabilizing agents such as exopolysaccharides and lipopolysaccharides.

Our results indicate that conventional tillage and reduced tillage equally promote the bacterial potential to produce EPS and LPS in the tillage horizon. However, as major bacterial groups triggering EPS and LPS formation were not the same, it is likely that gene expression pattern differ in the different treatments due to various pathways of gene induction and transcription in different bacterial species.