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, farm and 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 rDNA fragments 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.

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