Soil Microbial Community Analysis of Fusarium Infected Soils

This research focused on the assessment of the bacterial communities of soils infected with Foc R1 for both susceptible and resistant banana cultivars using amplicon sequence analysis. The four Musa cultivars studied were Saba, GCTCV, Latundan and Kluai Namwa which are selected according to their known resistance to Foc R1. Saba and GCTCV 219 cultivars are resistant while Latundan and Kluai Namwa are susceptible to Foc R1. Results showed that the number of bacterial OTUs was higher in the soils of resistant than in susceptible cultivars. However, the reverse is true for the number of OTUs for both fungi and AMF. The findings of this study showed that the microbial community of the banana soils are diverse and different depending on the cultivar, susceptibility to Fusarium and proximity to rhizosphere.