Abstract
Endophytes are highly associated with plant growth and health. Exploring the variation of bacterial communities in different plant niches is essential for understanding microbe-plant interactions. In this study, high-throughput gene sequencing was used to analyze the composition and abundance of bacteria from the rhizospheric soil and different parts of the Macleaya cordata. The results indicated that the bacterial community structure varied widely among compartments. Bacterial diversity was observed to be the highest in the rhizospheric soil and the lowest in fruits. Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes were found as the dominant phyla. The genera Sphingomonas (∼47.77%) and Methylobacterium (∼45.25%) dominated in fruits and leaves, respectively. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was employed to measure the alkaloid content of different plant parts. Significant correlations were observed between endophytic bacteria and alkaloids. Especially, Sphingomonas showed a significant positive correlation with sanguinarine and chelerythrine. All four alkaloids were negatively correlated with the microbiota of stems. The predicted result of PICRUST2 revealed that the synthesis of plant alkaloids might lead to a higher abundance of endophytic microorganisms with genes related to alkaloid synthesis, further demonstrated the correlation between bacterial communities and alkaloids. This study provided the first insight into the bacterial community composition in different parts of Macleaya cordata and the correlation between the endophytic bacteria and alkaloids.
Highlights
Endophytes are widely present inside plants during part or all stages of their life cycle
After quality control and contaminant sequences removal, 1,218,950 high-quality paired 16S rRNA sequences with an average read length of 300 bp remained, which can be clustered into 6,866 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) (Supplementary Table 1)
This study provided the first insight into the bacterial communities of different plant tissues and rhizospheric soil in Macleaya cordata
Summary
Endophytes are widely present inside plants during part or all stages of their life cycle. They are able to survive in the root, stem, leaf, fruit, flower, and seed due to the specific colonization conditions provided by plant tissues and organs (Loaces et al, 2010; Bulgarelli et al, 2013; Wellner et al, 2013; Glassner et al, 2015). Soil microorganisms were partially the source of endophytic bacteria (Zarraonaindia et al, 2015; Mangeot-Peter et al, 2020) They migrated and colonized the area around the root of plants under the influence of the roots’ secretions (Tahtamouni et al, 2015). Significant plant compartment effects were observed in the microbiome of plants such as Populus, Cycas panzhihuaensis, and Stellera chamaejasme L (Jin et al, 2014; Cregger et al, 2018; Zheng and Gong, 2019)
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