Abstract
Farmers grow sweetpotatoes worldwide and some sub-Saharan African and Asian diets include sweetpotato as a staple, yet the sweetpotato microbiome is conspicuously less studied relative to crops such as maize, soybean, and wheat. Studying sweetpotato microbiome ecology may reveal paths to engineer the microbiome to improve sweetpotato yield, and/or combat sweetpotato pests and diseases. We sampled sweetpotatoes and surrounding soil from two North Carolina farms. We took samples from sweetpotato fields under two different land management regimes, conventional and organic, and collected two sweetpotato cultivars, ‘Beauregard’ and ‘Covington’. By comparing small subunit rRNA gene amplicon sequence profiles from sweetpotato storage root skin, rhizosphere, and surrounding soil, we found the skin microbiome possessed the least composition heterogeneity among samples, lowest alpha-diversity, and was significantly nested by the rhizosphere in amplicon sequence variant (ASV) membership. Many ASVs were specific to a single field and/or only found in either the skin, rhizosphere, or surrounding soil. Notably, sweetpotato skin enriched for Planctomycetaceae in relative abundance at both farms. This study elucidates underpinnings of sweetpotato microbiome community assembly, quantifies microbiome composition variance within a single farm, and reveals microorganisms associated with sweetpotato skin that belong to common but uncultured soil phylotypes. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY 4.0 International license .
Highlights
Farmers grow sweetpotatoes worldwide and some sub-Saharan African and Asian diets include sweetpotato as a staple, yet the sweetpotato microbiome is conspicuously less studied relative to crops such as maize, soybean, and wheat
By comparing small subunit rRNA gene amplicon sequence profiles from sweetpotato storage root skin, rhizosphere, and surrounding soil, we found the skin microbiome possessed the least composition heterogeneity among samples, lowest alphadiversity, and was significantly nested by the rhizosphere in amplicon sequence variant (ASV) membership
2011), a phylogeny-aware metric, as the sample distance measure we found beta-diversity to increase from sweetpotato skin to rhizosphere (P value 6.1e-05, Welch’s two-sample t test) and from rhizosphere to surrounding soil (P value 1.9e-15, Welch’s twosample t test)
Summary
Farmers grow sweetpotatoes worldwide and some sub-Saharan African and Asian diets include sweetpotato as a staple, yet the sweetpotato microbiome is conspicuously less studied relative to crops such as maize, soybean, and wheat. Studying sweetpotato microbiome ecology may reveal paths to engineer the microbiome to improve sweetpotato yield, and/or combat sweetpotato pests and diseases. We sampled sweetpotatoes and surrounding soil from two North Carolina farms. By comparing small subunit rRNA gene amplicon sequence profiles from sweetpotato storage root skin, rhizosphere, and surrounding soil, we found the skin microbiome possessed the least composition heterogeneity among samples, lowest alphadiversity, and was significantly nested by the rhizosphere in amplicon sequence variant (ASV) membership. This study elucidates underpinnings of sweetpotato microbiome community assembly, quantifies microbiome composition variance within a single farm, and reveals microorganisms associated with sweetpotato skin that belong to common but uncultured soil phylotypes. Many studies have investigated the microbiomes of crops commonly grown in the United States such as maize (Bouffaud et al 2014; Emmett et al 2017; Niu et al 2017; Peiffer and Ley 2013; Peiffer et al 2013), soybean (Hamid et al 2017; Rascovan et al 2016; Wang et al 2017; Zhang et al 2018), and wheat
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