Abstract
Little is known about establishment success of the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) inocula and their effects on a soil-indigenous community of AMF. In this study, we assessed the effect of introducing Rhizophagus irregularis DAOM-197198 in soil under field condition on the community composition of indigenous AMF in the roots of corn (Zea mays), soybean (Glycine max), and wheat (Triticum aestivum). Three field trials were conducted with inoculated and non-inoculated plots. Four to ten roots and their rhizosphere soil samples of two growth stages for corn and wheat, and one growing stage of soybean, were collected, totalling 122 root and soil samples. Root colonization was measured microscopically, and the fungal communities were determined by paired-end Illumina MiSeq amplicon sequencing using 18S rDNA marker. After quality trimming and merging of paired ends, 6.7 million sequences could be assigned to 414 different operational taxonomic units. These could be assigned to 68 virtual taxa (VT) using the AMF reference sequence database MaarjAM. The most abundant VT corresponded to R. irregularis. The inoculation treatment did not influence the presence of R. irregularis, or AMF community diversity in roots. This seems to indicate that inoculation with R. irregularis DAOM-197198 does not change the indigenous AMF community composition, probably because it is already present in high abundance naturally.
Highlights
Nutrient acquisition by plants is largely affected by organisms thriving in root and soil [1]
Paired-end reads were merged, trimmed, and filtered to remove reads with homopolymers and ambiguous sites, resulting in 6,711,213 merged reads, which corresponded well with the predicted amplicon size of 400 bp. These were grouped into 414 unique operational taxonomic units (OTUs) at 96% sequence identity after chimeras were removed and further clustered into 68 virtual taxa (VT) based on the MaarjAM database [21] (Table S1, Supplementary Materials)
Forty-two (62%) of these VT were assigned to Glomus ( Rhizophagus) taxa
Summary
Nutrient acquisition by plants is largely affected by organisms thriving in root and soil [1] Among those essential soil microorganisms, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in the phylum Glomeromycota are an ancient group of fungi that appeared together with the first land plants [2]. Over the last 30 years, extensive research has been conducted to improve our understanding of how AMF deliver nutrients to their host By harnessing this process and the factors that control nutrient cycling between the fungus and the plant, agricultural crop yield could be increased significantly while reducing the need to supply crops with system-external nutrients. Previously Glomus intraradices) is so far the most common AMF isolate that is produced commercially in axenic condition for two decades [10]
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