Investigations into the microbial community structure and functionality within the rhizosphere microbiome of both wild and cultivated Coptis chinensis.

Coptis chinensis is one of the most frequently used materials in traditional Chinese medicine, with extensive cultivation across the southwest regions of China. In recent years, since the irregular planting practices inevitably affected the balance and functional diversity of soil microecology, root rot has been a significant challenge for cultivated C. chinensis. The rewilding of plant microbiomes has emerged as a promising strategy to promote plant health recently. The central step involves the identification of key beneficial microbiota from wild progenitors in their sites of origin. Thus, the wild and cultivated accessions of C. chinensis from different habitats were collected, and rhizobacterial community profiling, species abundance modeling, and co-occurrence network analyses were subsequently performed to identify key beneficial ancestral microbiota.