root fungal microbiome of Agrostis stolonifera from a french peatland. root fungal microbiome of Agrostis stolonifera

Within the root endosphere, fungi are known to be important for plant nutrition and resistance to stresses. Nevertheless, the description and understanding of the community assembly rules of fungal fraction of the plant microbiome remains scarce. By using an innovative DNA and RNA based analysis of co-extracted nucleic acids, we revealed herein the complexity of the fungal community colonizing roots of an Agrostis stolonifera population and defined the composition of the fungal core-microbiome (i.e. 5% of the 634 OTUs found). We showed that the endophytic fungal communities were phylogenetically structured in plant roots that can be explained by a strong plant effect as environmental filter. At a finer grain, this ecological process favours co-existence of related and similar species within Basidiomycota community assembly, whereas Ascomycota and Glomeromycota communities seemed impacted by competitive interactions, promoting co-existence of phylogenetically related but ecologically dissimilar species.