Abstract
Purpose
Soil pH and microbial community composition are crucial determinates of plant health. However, their contributions to the success or failure of plant pathogen colonization and the underlying mechanisms are still unknown.
Methods
We used real-time PCR and Miseq sequencing to investigate the colonization efficiency of Ralstonia solanacearum, a typical plant pathogen, in diverse pH values (6.2, 7.0, and 7.8) and residential microbial communities created by soil sterilization and microbial re-inoculation.
Results
Both pH and microbial re-inoculation significantly influenced the composition of soil bacterial community, while the relative importance of pH (86.44%) far outweighed that of microbial re-inoculation (4.32%). The abundance of R. solanacearum was significantly lower and the complexity of soil microbial network was higher in soils with a higher pH value, and meanwhile the relative abundances of key pathogen-antagonistic microbes were significantly increased in these soils. Structural equation modeling and an independent verification test further suggested that the indirect effect of soil pH, or the effect of soil pH on bacterial community composition, was the primary driver of the success or failure of R. solanacearum colonization. The incidence of bacterial wilt disease was highly variable, but the disease incidence was lowest in low pH soils. Low disease incidence was mainly attributed to the significant increase of key microbes, such as Firmicutes, Paenibacillus, Luteibacter, Chitinophagaceae, and Rhodanobacter, which are known to induce systemic resistance in plant.
Conclusions
Our results suggest that soil pH indirectly determines plant pathogen colonization through its impact on soil microbial community composition.
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Data Availability
The raw sequencing data were deposited at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive database with the accession number of PRJNA824239.
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The authors thanks the editors and reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We also acknowledge TopEdit LLC for the linguistic editing and proofreading during the preparation of this manuscript.
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This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U21A20226, 42090065 and 32160748), the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (2020B0202010006), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M691625), and the Key Research and Development Project (Agriculture) of Yichun City, Jiangxi Province (20211YFN4240).
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X.Q.H., C.C.D., and Z.C.C. conceived designed research. L.L.L., Z.Y.C., Z.S., and S.L. performed the experiment and collected the data. L.L.L and A.A. analysed the data. L.L.L. wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.
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Liu, L., Chen, Z., Su, Z. et al. Soil pH indirectly determines Ralstonia solanacearum colonization through its impacts on microbial networks and specific microbial groups. Plant Soil 482, 73–88 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-022-05671-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-022-05671-3