Abstract
Revealing the unexplored rhizosphere microbiome of plants in arid environments can help in understanding their interactions between microbial communities and plants during harsh growth conditions. Here, we report the first investigation of rhizospheric fungal and bacterial communities of Adenium obesum, Aloe dhufarensis and Cleome austroarabica using next-generation sequencing approaches. A. obesum and A. dhufarensis grows in dry tropical and C. austroarabica in arid conditions of Arabian Peninsula. The results indicated the presence of 121 fungal and 3662 bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) whilst microbial diversity was significantly high in the rhizosphere of A. obesum and A. dhufarensis and low in C. austroarabica. Among fungal phyla, Ascomycota and Basidiomycota were abundantly associated within rhizospheres of all three plants. However, Mucoromycota was only present in the rhizospheres of A. obesum and A. dhufarensis, suggesting a variation in fungal niche on the basis of host and soil types. In case of bacterial communities, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Planctomycetes, Acidobacteria, and Verrucomicrobia were predominant microbial phyla. These results demonstrated varying abundances of microbial structure across different hosts and locations in arid environments. Rhizosphere’s extracellular enzymes analysis revealed varying quantities, where, glucosidase, cellulase, esterase, and 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate deaminase were significantly higher in the rhizosphere of A. dhufarensis, while phosphatase and indole-acetic acid were highest in the rhizosphere of A. obesum. In conclusion, current findings usher for the first time the core microbial communities in the rhizospheric regions of three arid plants that vary greatly with location, host and soil conditions, and suggest the presence of extracellular enzymes could help in maintaining plant growth during the harsh environmental conditions.
Highlights
The arid or semi-arid land covers almost 26% of the earth’s ecosystems, where life is constrained and often confronted with extremely low water and high temperature
This was evidenced from the soil physical and chemical properties suggesting a complete segregation of the two locations i.e., dry tropical to the complete arid land system
The majority of the present insights into the interactions and processes of rhizosphere microbiome have come from studies on model plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana and Medicago truncatula and agricultural or horticultural crops [10,26,49], a reasonable progress has being made in elucidating the microbial ecology of non-cultivated plant species [16,17,26]
Summary
The arid or semi-arid land covers almost 26% of the earth’s ecosystems, where life is constrained and often confronted with extremely low water and high temperature. The vegetation is either succulent (accumulating water) or non-succulent perennial hard plants. Both are true xerophytes and are well adapted to the low water conditions [1]. The plant, on the other hand, facilitates a suitable niche for distinct microbes to grow and reproduce while mutually sharing beneficial exudates and nutrients [16,17]. Such interactions between the microbial communities and medicinal plants have been minimally investigated, in arid ecosystems [5]. Previous studies [18,19,20,21,22,23] have evaluated the microbiome, especially the bacterial communities from arid soil; no studies have been performed on the rhizosphere microbiomes of arid plants
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