Study of soil bacterial communities with the Fusarim graminarum inoculum

We investigated how soil microbial diversity would affect Fusarium graminarum invasion in relation to litter decomposition, at a laboratory scale. In the setup, we tried to modify soil microbial diversity by autoclaving soil and then inoculating with diluted/undiluted soil suspensions (Soil DI and UI). The original soil (Original), which had been received the equal amount of water instead of the soil suspensions, were included as a control. We added the inoculum of Fusarium graminarum and then started a preliminary incubation of the three soil treatments to settle the inoculated microbes to the new environment. After the 2 weeks (on week 0), litterbags of the maize litter were incorporated into the soils and then incubated for another 6 weeks. The soils were sampled at week 0 (W0) and 6 (W6) and used for 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing.