phyllosphere fungi sequencing

Revealing community assemblages and their impacts on ecosystem service is a core issue in microbial ecology. However, what ecological factors play dominant role in phyllosphere fungi community assemblage and how they link to crop quality are largely unknown. Here, we applied ITS high-throughput sequencing to investigated foliar fungal community assemblages across three cultivars of Solanaceae crop and two planting regions with different climatic conditions. Network analyses were employed to reveal the pattern in foliar fungi co-occurrence and phylogenetic analyses based on null model was used to elucidate the ecological assembly of foliar fungi community. We found that the sensory quality of crop leaves and the composition of foliar fungi community were significantly various across planting regions and cultivars. In Guangcun (GC), the region with relative high humidity and low precipitation, there are lower diversity but more unique fungi species than the region of Wuzhishan (WZS). Further, we found that the co-occurrence network of foliar fungi communities in GC were more complex than that in WZS, and the network properties were closely related to sensory quality of crop. Finally, the results of phylogenetic analyses based on null model showed that the community assembly of all samples was dominated by the stochastic process of ecological drift, which may result that community phylogeny structure have little effects on sensory quality of crop leaves. Taken together, our results highlighted climatic conditions and cultivars play key roles in assemblage of foliar fungi communities and crop quality, which enhances our understanding the connections between phyllosphere microbiome and ecosystem service especially in agricultural production.