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Shifts in diversity and community structure of endophytic bacteria and archaea across root, stem and leaf tissues in the common reed, Phragmites australis, along a salinity gradient in a marine tidal wetland of northern China

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Abstract

The effects of salt stress on endophytic prokaryotic communities in plants are largely unknown, and the distribution patterns of bacterial and archaeal endophytes in different tissues of a plant species are rarely compared. We investigated the endophytic bacterial and archaeal communities in roots, stems and leaves of the common reed, Phragmites australis, collected from three tidal zones along a salinity gradient, using terminal restriction fragment (T-RF) length polymorphism analysis of the 16S rRNA genes. The results showed that the bacterial diversity in the roots was significantly higher than that in the leaves, whereas similar archaeal diversity was revealed for either plant tissues or tidal zones. Network analysis revealed that T-RFs were grouped largely by tissue, and the major groups were generally linked by a few common T-RFs. Unique T-RFs in roots were mainly present in plants growing in the supratidal zone, but unique T-RFs in stems and leaves were mainly present in those from the middle and high tidal zones. Non-metric multidimensional scaling ordination and analysis of similarity revealed that bacterial communities were significantly different among tissues (P < 0.05), but similar among tidal zones (P = 0.49). However, the archaeal communities differed among tidal zones (P < 0.05), but were similar among tissues (P = 0.89). This study indicates that: (1) the endophytic archaeal communities are influenced more significantly than the endophytic bacterial communities by soil salinity, and (2) the differential distribution patterns of bacterial and archaeal endophytes in plant tissues along a salinity gradient imply that these two groups play different roles in coastal hydrophytes.

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Acknowledgments

The work was financially supported by the Main Direction Program of Knowledge Innovation of CAS (Grant no. KSCX2-EW-G-12B), Shandong Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars (No. JQ201210), the Open Fund of MOIDAT (Grant no. 201318), and the One Hundred Talent Program of CAS awarded to Jun Gong.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Microbial Ecology, Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, 264003, China

    Bin Ma, Xiaofei Lv & Jun Gong

  2. Network Laboratory for Coastal Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, 264003, China

    Bin Ma & Jun Gong

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Xiaofei Lv

  4. Department of Life Sciences, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, UK

    Alan Warren

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  1. Bin Ma
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  2. Xiaofei Lv
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  4. Jun Gong
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Correspondence to Jun Gong.

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Ma, B., Lv, X., Warren, A. et al. Shifts in diversity and community structure of endophytic bacteria and archaea across root, stem and leaf tissues in the common reed, Phragmites australis, along a salinity gradient in a marine tidal wetland of northern China. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 104, 759–768 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-013-9984-3

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