root associated fungus metagenome Targeted loci environmental

Prior studies have addressed how fungi respond to various environmental filters, and how plant hosts might foster different fungal communitiesThe relative importance of environment and host relatedness for fungal community structure, however, still has not been thoroughly addressed. In this study, we used metabarcoding and high throughput sequencing of the ITS2 region of fungal DNA to assess whether fungal community structure differed between the roots and rhizosphere of coffee and native forest Rubiaceae, and how fungal community in the bulk soil compared with these communities. I hypothesized that, because host relatedness encompasses plant traits that are important for fungal community structure (Mazel et al., 2018), fungal communities on coffee roots would be more similar to those of closely related tree species than to those of more distantly related species in the plant family Rubiaceae. Therefore, host phylogenetic distance from coffee should be an important predictor of differences in fungal community composition. Alternatively, if environment is more important than host relatedness in shaping root and rhizosphere fungal communities, I expected to observe a closer correspondence between coffee root fungal communities and coffee soil fungal communities than between coffee root fungal communities and related forest trees in the Rubiaceae.