Abstract：Soil ecosystem is the important carrier of the agricultural ecosystem security and agriculturally sustainable development, and is the basis for human survival. The rapid development of genetic engineering and introduction of genetically modified crops (GMCs) have provided large economic benefits, but have also raised concerns over the potential impacts of these crops on environment. Among these environmental concerns, the unpredicted and complex impacts that GMCs might have on soil ecosystem, especially on its microbial community structure and function, have been recently increasingly studied, which has become one of the hot research directions in soil biosafety area. This review briefly summarizes the impacts of GMCs on microbial community in recent years, in which the advances on the effects of planted GMCs on rhizosphere microbial community diversity, both biological and technical approaches for the diversity research, and the countermeasures for assessing the risk of GMCs on rhizospheric microbes are highlighted and discussed.
