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Soil microbes alleviate allelopathy of invasive plants

  • Article
  • Life & Medical Sciences
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Science Bulletin

Abstract

Soil microbes are one of the most important determinants of allelopathic effects in the field. However, most studies testing the role of allelopathy in biological invasions did not consider the roles of soil microbes. Here we tested the hypothesis that soil microbes which can degrade allelochemicals may accumulate in soils over time by adaptation and therefore increase the degradation of allelochemicals and alleviate the allelopathic effects in biological invasions. As expected, soil microbes significantly decreased the allelopathic effects of leaf leachates of eight in the nine invasive plant species studied. In addition, Ageratina adenophora showed lower allelopathic effects in soil with long or intermediately invasion history than those in soil with short invasion history. The two main allelochemicals of the invader were degraded more rapidly with increasing invasion history in the soil. Correspondingly, biomass and activity of the soil microbes were higher in the soils with long invasion history than in that with short invasion history. Our results indicate that soil microbes may gradually adapt to the allelochemicals of Ageratina and alleviate its allelopathic effects and thus support the above hypothesis. It is necessary to consider the effects of soil microbes when testing the roles of allelopathy or the novel weapons hypothesis in biological invasions.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Da-Wen Li and Ailaoshan Station for Subtropical Forest Ecosystem Studies, Chinese Academy of Sciences for field assistance. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31100410, 31470575 and 30830027), the National Key Technology R&D Program of China (2011BAD30B00), and Chinese Academy Science 135 Program (XTBG-T01, F01).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, 650032, China

    Yang-Ping Li & Ya-Jun Chen

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100039, China

    Yang-Ping Li

  3. College of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang, 110866, China

    Yu-Long Feng

  4. Yunnan Tropical Crops Science Research Institute, Jinghong, 666100, China

    Yao-Hua Tian

Authors
  1. Yang-Ping Li
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  2. Yu-Long Feng
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  3. Ya-Jun Chen
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  4. Yao-Hua Tian
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Correspondence to Yang-Ping Li or Yu-Long Feng.

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Li, YP., Feng, YL., Chen, YJ. et al. Soil microbes alleviate allelopathy of invasive plants. Sci. Bull. 60, 1083–1091 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11434-015-0819-7

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