Abstract
Characterizing the relationship between soil biotic and abiotic properties and plant health status is crucial to understanding the pathogenesis of soil-borne diseases. Here, we compared these properties in the soils of lisianthus with different disease incidence plots and report the cause-effect relationship between soil properties and plant health status using heat treatment coupled with microbiota self/across re-inoculations. The relative importance of soil bacterial and fungal communities in predicting plant health was also analyzed. Results showed that the soils with low and high disease incidences (LDS and HDS) harbored differential microbial communities and physicochemical properties. The LDS soil had relatively low Fusarium oxysporum abundance, electrical conductivity (EC), and NO3−-N content. Soil microbial community was the direct determinant of plant health. The disease-suppressive activity of the microbiome in the LDS soil could be transferred to the HDS soil. Also, the relative importance of the fungal community in predicting plant health status was greater than that of the bacterial community, as reflected by (1) the fungal community could drive more complex networks related to healthy plants and (2) the diversity and core taxa of the fungal community had higher mean predictor importance values for plant health. The relative abundances of core genera Acremonium, Mycothermus, and Chryseolinea were significantly and negatively correlated with the disease incidence and the abundances of pathogens, identifying these genera as potential disease-suppressive agents. Taken together, our results reveal a direct relationship between soil properties and plant health status, in which the fungal community composition is most important for predicting plant health status.
Key points
• Soil with differing pathological groups harbors distinct microbial communities.
• Soil microbial communities directly determine the plant’s health status.
• Fungal community is a better predictor of plant health than the bacterial community.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Change history
30 August 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-021-11544-z
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Funding
This work was financially supported by the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (2020B0202010006), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42090065, 41771281), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M691625), Reserve Talent Project of Young and Middle-aged Academic and Technical Leaders of Yunnan Province (202005AC160043), the Priority Academic Program Development (PAPD) of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, and the Science and Technology Research Project of Education Department of Jiangxi Province (No. GJJ190870).
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L.L.L., J.Z., Z.C.C., C.C.D., and X.Q.H. conceived designed research. L.L.L., Y.Y.Y., and H.X.D. conducted experiments. L.L.L. analyzed data and wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript. In addition, we acknowledge TopEdit LLC for the linguistic editing and proofreading during the preparation of this manuscript.
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Liu, L., Yan, Y., Ding, H. et al. The fungal community outperforms the bacterial community in predicting plant health status. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 105, 6499–6513 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-021-11486-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-021-11486-6