Abstract
The diversity of Phytophthora species in declining Fagaceae forests in Europe is increasing in the last years. The genus Quercus is one of the most extended Fagaceae genera in Europe, and Q. ilex is the dominant tree in Spain. The introduction of soil-borne pathogens, such as Phytophthora in Fagaceae forests modifies the microbial community present in the rhizosphere, and has relevant environmental and economic consequences. A better understanding of the diversity of Phytophthora spp. associated with Q. ilex is proposed in this study by using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in six Q. ilex stands located in three regions in Spain. Thirty-seven Phytophthora phylotypes belonging to clades 1 to 12, except for clades 4, 5 and 11, are detected in this study, which represents a high diversity of Phytophthora species in holm oak Spanish forests. Phytophthora chlamydospora, P. citrophthora, P. gonapodyides, P. lacustris, P. meadii, P. plurivora, P. pseudocryptogea, P. psychrophila and P. quercina were present in the three regions. Seven phylotypes could not be associated with known Phytophthora species, so they were putatively named as Phytophthora sp. Most of the detected phylotypes corresponded to terrestrial Phytophthora species but aquatic species from clades 6 and 9 were also present in all regions.
Highlights
The genus Phytophthora comprises nowadays more than 150 species with a broad host range, and includes well-known plant pathogens that are devastating natural ecosystems [1,2,3]
Phytophthora chlamydospora, P. citrophthora, P. gonapodyides, P. lacustris, P. meadii, P. plurivora, P. pseudocryptogea, P. psychrophila and P. quercina were present in the three regions
In the Extremadura region, 66,732 total ITS1 sequences were generated from the pyrosequenced soil samples collected in 2012. These had an average length of 308 bp, and only 61,576 high quality sequences were considered for the analysis after trimming, and excluding singletons; 48.7% of the sequences were identified from declining trees, and 51.3% from non-declining trees
Summary
The genus Phytophthora comprises nowadays more than 150 species with a broad host range, and includes well-known plant pathogens that are devastating natural ecosystems [1,2,3]. Fagaceae forests, with Phytophthora hosts such as Quercus, Castanea, Lithocarpus or Fagus species, are an example of declining forests affected by Phytophthora worldwide [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. In Europe, Castanea, Fagus and Quercus are the most extended Fagaceae genera [13]. It is known that depending on which
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