Abstract
Panax ginseng is a well-known medicinal plant that achieves strong resistance against plant pathogens while growing in the wild. Due to the high market demand for ginseng as a health food source, ginseng cultivation is prevalent in South Korea. However, continuous monocropping creates problems like irregular growth or vulnerability to crop diseases. Quorum sensing (QS) deals with the intracellular communication of bacteria and plays a role in dynamic changes in the soil microbiome. Here, we investigated how acyl-homoserine lactone (AHL) signaling molecules in QS (C8, C10, and C12) improve plant growth and induce shifts in the soil microbiome. To assess the effects, we recorded root and shoot growth of ginseng seedlings and checked the changes in the soil microbiome during different time points (0, 2, 4, and 8) after 8 weeks of growth. We observed that soils treated with N-decanoyl-L-homoserine lactone (C10) showed the most pronounced effects. Very striking was that C10 had the lowest alpha diversity. Using Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States (PICRUSt2), we observed a high number of QS-related functional genes, with the highest count occurring in the untreated planted soil (W). Together with the known direct and beneficial effects of AHLs on plant development, AHLs treated mono-cropped soil showed trends in the microbiome community.
Highlights
To observe the phenotypic effect of the acyl-homoserine lactone (AHL) treatments, the growth parameters of the ginseng seedlings were recorded after two months of growth
Our work focused on the shift of the soil microbiome involved in the ginseng soil rhizosphere
We observed that in the AHL-treated group, the total alpha diversity was lower than in bulk soil (BS) and W, which contrasts with the normal occurrence of a high microbial diversity known to be exhibited by healthy plants
Summary
Grown in Korea, China, Japan, and Russia, P. ginseng is considered an essential crop due to the ginseng saponins it produces, which have pharmacological properties [1,2]. It is regarded as one of the most extensively used herbal medicines and is reported to have a wide range of applications in therapeutic and pharmacological industries [3]. Since it is a herbaceous perennial plant, it takes at least 5–6 years for ginseng to reach marketable size, while some strains cultivated in mountain forests take longer than 10 years to mature [4,5]
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