Abstract
Background: Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.), an important oilseed and food legume, is widely cultivated in the semi-arid tropics. Drought is the major stress in this region which limits productivity. Microbial communities in the rhizosphere are of special importance to stress tolerance. However, relatively little is known about the relationship between drought and microbial communities in peanuts. Method: In this study, deep sequencing of the V3-V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene was performed to characterize the microbial community structure of drought-treated and untreated peanuts. Results: Taxonomic analysis showed that Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Saccharibacteria, Chloroflexi, Acidobacteria and Cyanobacteria were the dominant phyla in the peanut rhizosphere. Comparisons of microbial community structure of peanuts revealed that the relative abundance of Actinobacteria and Acidobacteria dramatically increased in the seedling and podding stages in drought-treated soil, while that of Cyanobacteria and Gemmatimonadetes increased in the flowering stage in drought-treated rhizospheres. Metagenomic profiling indicated that sequences related to metabolism, signaling transduction, defense mechanism and basic vital activity were enriched in the drought-treated rhizosphere, which may have implications for plant survival and drought tolerance. Conclusion: This microbial communities study will form the foundation for future improvement of drought tolerance of peanuts via modification of the soil microbes.
Highlights
Peanut or groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L., Fabaceae), one of the five most important oilseed crops, serves as a good source of protein, calories, vitamins and minerals [1,2]
We combined controlled root surface and rhizospheric soil to control rhizosphere (CR), the various drought-treated root surface and rhizospheric soils were defined as seedling stage drought-treated rhizosphere (SDR), flowering stage drought-treated rhizosphere (FDR) and podding stage drought-treated rhizosphere (PDR), respectively
Low quality reads were filtered using the Quantitative Insights into Microbial Ecology software (QIIME) and trimming the primers, adapters and barcodes, sequencing quantities of each sample counted were listed in Supplementary Table S1
Summary
Peanut or groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L., Fabaceae), one of the five most important oilseed crops, serves as a good source of protein, calories, vitamins and minerals [1,2]. Plants must respond properly through a variety of molecular mechanisms, including morphological adaptations, physiological acclimation, and cellular adjustment [9]. Various studies have emerged implicating the root external environment (rhizosphere) to be involved in a wide range of stress tolerances in plants, including high salinity, drought and pathogen infection, which provides a novel direction in future improvement of stress tolerance of peanuts via modifying the soil microbial community [13,14,15,16]. We examined the impacts of developmental stages on the drought-treated root-associated microbial community structure of cultivated peanuts. The study aimed to assess and provide new insight into the influence of developmental stages and drought stress on the composition of the microbial community in the peanut rhizosphere
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