Abstract
Ephedra sinica is one of the most famous Chinese medicinal plants. The insufficient supply of wild resources has led to the increased use of cultivated products. However, the related medicinal quality differs significantly. Although the influence of external environment on the quality of E. sinica has been studied, the impact of endophytic microbes on it remains vague. This study characterized differential metabolites and microbial community compositions in wild and cultivated E. sinica by combining metabolomics with microbiomics, and explored the effect of endophytes on the formation of differential metabolites further. The results showed that the difference in quality between wild and cultivated E. sinica was mainly in the productions of alkaloids, flavonoids, and terpenoids. The associated endophytes had special compositional characteristics. For instance, the distribution and abundance of dominant endophytes varied between wild and cultivated E. sinica. Several endophytes had significant or highly significant correlations with the formations of ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, d-cathinone, methcathinone, coumarin, kaempferol, rhamnetin, or phenylacetic acid. This study will deepen our understanding of the plant-endophyte interactions and provide a strategy for the quality control of E. sinica products.
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Data availability
The raw sequence data generated as part of this study has been deposited in NCBI (https://submit.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) and was publicly available with Short Read Archive accession: PRJNA735567.
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Funding
This work was financially supported by the Key Project at Central Government Level: The Ability Establishment of Sustainable Use for Valuable Chinese Medicine Resources (2060302), Fundamental Research Program of Shanxi Province (20210302123428), Research Project Supported by Shanxi Scholarship Council of China (2020–013), Fund Program for the Scientific Activities of Selected Returned Overseas Professionals in Shanxi Province (20220004), and Program for Innovative Leading Talents for Science and Technology of Xianyang City (L2022CXNLRC009).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection and analysis were performed by Jin-Long Cui, Xin Ji, and Shuang-Man Miao. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Hui Zhang. Ye Xia, Gang Zhang, and Yi-Min Li revised the manuscript critically for important intellectual content. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhang, H., Xia, Y., Cui, JL. et al. The composition characteristics of endophytic communities and their relationship with metabolites profile in Ephedra sinica under wild and cultivated conditions. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 95648–95659 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29145-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29145-w