Dataset Information

Prokaryotic taxa play keystone roles in the soil microbiome associated with woody perennial plants in the genus Buxus.

ABSTRACT: The microbiome associated with ornamental plants has largely been neglected, despite its potential for impacting plant health. This work characterized the composition, diversity, and microbial co-associations in the soil microbiome associated with species and cultivars of plant in the genus Buxus (common name boxwood), a group of woody perennial shrubs commonly used in residential landscapes and found in native ecosystems. Soil was collected from 82 individual curated boxwood accessions at the U.S. National Arboretum National Boxwood Collection. Amplicon libraries targeting archaea, bacteria, and fungi were generated and sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform. Identification of individual sequence variants resulted in 275 archaeal, 15,580 bacterial, and 7,525 fungal taxa. Neither spatial distance among samples nor association with different types of boxwood were significant predictors of soil microbiome composition. However, archaeal and bacterial diversity was significantly different in soil from distinct types of boxwood. Co-association networks indicated that archaea and bacteria show greater evidence of being keystone taxa than fungi. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential for targeting specific keystone taxa to shift the soil microbiome associated with these boxwood accessions and that planting different species or cultivars in the landscape may shift the diversity of prokaryotic microorganisms.

SUBMITTER: LeBlanc N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6802073 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Prokaryotic taxa play keystone roles in the soil microbiome associated with woody perennial plants in the genus <i>Buxus</i>.

LeBlanc Nicholas N Crouch Jo Anne JA

Ecology and evolution 20190826 19

The microbiome associated with ornamental plants has largely been neglected, despite its potential for impacting plant health. This work characterized the composition, diversity, and microbial co-associations in the soil microbiome associated with species and cultivars of plant in the genus <i>Buxus</i> (common name boxwood), a group of woody perennial shrubs commonly used in residential landscapes and found in native ecosystems. Soil was collected from 82 individual curated boxwood accessions a ...[more]

PMID: 31641458

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Project description:Winter survival and maintenance strategy is crucial in temperate woody plants. Here, we demonstrate novel aspects of the transcriptional regulations adopted by perennial tree species in winter/dormancy, employing a biochemical and whole transcriptome analysis. As expected, genes related to cold hardiness and defense are over-represented. Interestingly, carbohydrate biosynthesis and transport-related genes were very actively expressed in winter/dormancy. Further biochemical analyses verified the dormancy/winter transcription phenotype. Furthermore, dormancy/winter preferential expression of genes involved in the cell wall biosynthesis/modification, circadian rhythm, the indirect transcriptional regulation (RNA metabolism), and chromatin modification/remodeling were identified. Taken together, regulation of gene expression in the winter survival and maintenance may include not only controlled by promoter binding transcription factors but may also be regulated at the post-transcriptional and chromatin levels. In the first step towards the understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying the winter survival and maintenance of perennial trees, we examined the characteristics of transcription phenotype of the dormancy/winter stem compared to the active growth/summer stem by using a whole transcriptome analysis (GeneChip Poplar Genome Array; Affymetrix). Poplar Genome Array has a total of 61,251 probe sets, representing 57,423 poplar gene models, and allows us to interrogate a total of 41,558 unique gene models because of the probe set redundancy. Slight redundancy of the probe sets within a single chip gave us a unique opportunity to have internal comparisons of the particular genes. Very high reproducibility (R2 > 0.97) between the replicated samples was found. Further confirmation of the GeneChip data was made by semi-quantitative RT-PCR analysis using several genes showing the summer or winter biased expression. Based on these results, further analysis of winter stem transcriptome against summer stem was performed.

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Dataset Information

Prokaryotic taxa play keystone roles in the soil microbiome associated with woody perennial plants in the genus Buxus.

Publications

Prokaryotic taxa play keystone roles in the soil microbiome associated with woody perennial plants in the genus <i>Buxus</i>.

Similar Datasets

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