Abstract
Postharvest food decay is one major issue for today’s food loss along the supply chain. Hot water treatment (HWT), a sustainable method to reduce pathogen-induced postharvest fruit decay, has been proven to be effective on a variety of crops. However, the microbiome response to HWT is still unknown, and the role of postharvest microbiota for fruit quality is largely unexplored. To study both, we applied a combined approach of metabarcoding analysis and real time qPCR for microbiome tracking. Overall, HWT was highly effective in reducing rot symptoms on apples under commercial conditions, and induced only slight changes to the fungal microbiota, and insignificantly affected the bacterial community. Pathogen infection, however, significantly decreased the bacterial and fungal diversity, and especially rare taxa were almost eradicated in diseased apples. Here, about 90% of the total fungal community was composed by co-occurring storage pathogens Neofabraea alba and Penicillium expansum. Additionally, the prokaryote to eukaryote ratio, almost balanced in apples before storage, was shifted to 0.6% bacteria and 99.4% fungi in diseased apples, albeit the total bacterial abundance was stable across all samples. Healthy stored apples shared 18 bacterial and 4 fungal taxa that were not found in diseased apples; therefore, defining a health-related postharvest microbiome. In addition, applying a combined approach of HWT and a biological control consortium consisting of Pantoea vagans 14E4, Bacillus amyloliquefaciens 14C9 and Pseudomonas paralactis 6F3, were proven to be efficient in reducing both postharvest pathogens. Our results provide first insights into the microbiome response to HWT, and suggest a combined treatment with biological control agents.
Highlights
Food loss is one of the major problems of modern society; about one-third of all produced food is either lost or wasted globally (FAO, 2015a)
Plants closely interact with their colonizing microorganisms, which are crucial for plant health and growth (Berg, 2009; Berendsen et al, 2012; Vandenkoornhuyse et al, 2015)
Core microbiota were defined for each sample group (“before storage,” “Hot water treatment (HWT),” “untreated healthy,” and “untreated diseased”), by keeping only the features present in 50% of the replicates of the respective group
Summary
Food loss is one of the major problems of modern society; about one-third of all produced food is either lost or wasted globally (FAO, 2015a). Plants closely interact with their colonizing microorganisms, which are crucial for plant health and growth (Berg, 2009; Berendsen et al, 2012; Vandenkoornhuyse et al, 2015). Even though the development of biocontrol application for postharvest use can be challenging, numerous biocontrol products were developed over the last decades as an alternative to classical synthetic pesticides for on-field, and for postharvest applications (Droby et al, 2016). Health considerations and potential prohibition of currently used pesticides as well as trends toward a fully biological production increased the demand for highly efficient biological alternatives over the last years (Droby et al, 2009). To increase the efficiency of biological control product a combined approach of classical and biological methods was suggested (Porat et al, 2002; Spadaro and Gullino, 2005)
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