Achieving bio-protection in New Zealand ecosystems mesocosm fungal pathogen OTU table

We established 80 experimental ecosystems (mesocosms), manipulated interactions between plants and soil biota in a fully factorial design. Each mesocosm was grown in a 125 L pot (575 mm diameter), and comprised one of 20 unique, eight-species plant communities varying orthogonally in the proportion of exotic and woody shrub/tree species (0-100% and 0-63%, respectively). These plants were taken from a pool of 20 exotic and 19 native/endemic New Zealand plant species. Soil biota were manipulated using a modified plant-soil feedback approach, where each plant species was grown in monoculture in 10 L pots containing field-collected soil for 9-10 months, allowing the conditioning of typical associated soil biota for each of the plant species. We created ‘home’ soils by taking the conditioned soil from each of the eight representative species in a mesocosm and mixing it together to create a single inoculum. Each ‘home’ soil mixture was also used as an ‘away soil’ in a different mesocosm that ..., DNA was extracted from a total of 491 root samples harvested from individual plants from all 80 mesocosms at the end of the experiment, using MoBio PowerSoil (QIAGEN) extraction kits. Root samples were taken from each individual plant using a sterile razor blade, cutting approximately 10-15 fine-root fragments from random places on the washed root ball, then bundling the roots together and slicing a 0.5-1.0 cm cross section piece from the bundle. Root samples were immediately placed into a 96 well plate from the extraction kit and frozen at -80oC as soon as a plate was full. We characterized the fungal communities by amplifying the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) of the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) operon using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with the barcoded primers fITS7/ITS4. 
PCR was run on each sample and controls using the following thermal cycler conditions: one cycle of initial denaturation at 94°C for 5 mins; 35 cycles of denaturation at 94°C for 30 secs; annealing at 57°C for 30 se..., , # Achieving Bio-Protection in New Zealand Ecosystems mesocosm fungal pathogen OTU table

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.c866t1gfz](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.c866t1gfz)

This dataset contains the OTU table describing the fungal pathogens sequenced in roots from 491 unique species grown in mesocosm communities.

The aim of this work was to understand the extent to which exotic plants share generalist pathogens with native plants and whether this \"pathogen spillover\" from exotic to native plants impacts exotic plant success in mixed communities.

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains a list of all of the plant species grown in the experiment, and from which DNA was extracted and sequenced. Each plant is labeled with a unique ID, provenance (native or exotic), the mesocosm community in which it grew, and the number of sequences from each potential operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Each OTU represents a putative fungal pathogen, as listed in the FUNGUILD ...