Abstract
It is important to identify and recover bacteria associating with fungi under natural soil conditions to enable eco-physiological studies, and to facilitate the use of bacterial-fungal consortia in environmental biotechnology. We have developed a novel type of baiting microcosm, where fungal hyphae interact with bacteria under close-to-natural soil conditions; an advantage compared to model systems that determine fungal influences on bacterial communities in laboratory media. In the current approach, the hyphae are placed on a solid support, which enables the recovery of hyphae with associated bacteria in contrast to model systems that compare bulk soil and mycosphere soil. We used the baiting microcosm approach to determine, for the first time, the composition of the bacterial community associating in the soil with hyphae of the phosphate-solubilizer, Penicillium bilaii. By applying a cultivation-independent 16S rRNA gene-targeted amplicon sequencing approach, we found a hypha-associated bacterial community with low diversity compared to the bulk soil community and exhibiting massive dominance of Burkholderia OTUs. Burkholderia is known be abundant in soil environments affected by fungi, but the discovery of this massive dominance among bacteria firmly associating with hyphae in soil is novel and made possible by the current bait approach.
Highlights
Soil is a highly complex environment and, as a consequence of its many microhabitats, soil harbors the highest known bacterial diversity on earth [1, 2]
Bacteria associated with Penicillium bilaii hyphae in soil
It is important to identify and recover bacteria associating with fungi under natural soil conditions to enable studies of both partners’ eco-physiology, and to facilitate the use of bacterialfungal consortia in environmental biotechnology
Summary
Soil is a highly complex environment and, as a consequence of its many microhabitats, soil harbors the highest known bacterial diversity on earth [1, 2]. Soil fungi account for the predominant fraction of the soil microbial biomass [3] and the total length of fungal hyphae in soil can exceed 1000 m per g [4]. Fungal hyphae provide a large surface for interactions with other soil microorganisms, and these microhabitats are referred to as bacterial-fungal interfaces [5, 6, 7]. The fungal hyphae represent efficient dispersal networks for their associated bacteria [8].It is becoming increasingly clear that fungi affect both. Bacteria associated with Penicillium bilaii hyphae in soil. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of this manuscript
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