poplar-fungal microbiome response to nitrogen addition

Plants are colonized by numerous microorganisms serving important symbiotic functions that are vital to plant growth and success. Understanding and harnessing these interactions will be useful in engineering carbon neutral ecosystems, but it is still unclear how variation in environmental conditions and starting microbial communities influence the trajectory of these interactions. In this study, we examine how nitrogen addition alters plant - fungal interactions across two species of Populus - Populus deltoides and P. trichocarpa grown with two starting microbial community inoculums sourced from the same location as the tree cuttings. We used targeted amplicon sequencing of the ITS2 gene region to characterize the rhizosphere and root endosphere fungal community.