Rhizoctonia root rot and bare patch disease, caused by the soilborne fungus Rhizoctonia solani anastomosis group (AG) 8, results in patches of stunted plants with reduced grain production. The disease causes losses of $77 million per annum in cereal cropping in Australia. In the absence of resistant cultivars of wheat or barley and a wide host range, current disease control measures are limited. A sustainable and enduring method for disease control is needed and may lie in the enhancement of biological disease suppression, where the resident microbial community counteracts the pathogen and inhibits it from infecting the plant. The mechanism of disease suppression is not known for this pathosystem however there is evidence of effective biological control of R. solani at our study site in Avon, South Australia. A metatranscriptomic approach was applied to determine the taxonomic and functional characteristics of the rhizosphere microbiome of wheat plants grown in adjacent fields which are suppressive and non-suppressive for Rhizoctonia solani AG 8. Disease suppressive soils had a unique microbial community according to their gene expression profiles. Microbial mRNA transcripts from twelve rhizosphere samples were mapped to metabolic databases (KEGG, COG, SEED) to infer differentially expressed microbial functional genes in suppressive and non-suppressive rhizosphere soils. These differentially expressed genes provide a focus for future studies to determine precisely the molecular interplay of plant-microbe-pathogen interactions with the ultimate goal of the development of a beneficial rhizosphere microflora to reduce R. solani AG 8 infection of crops.