Investigations into the microbial community structure and functionality within the rhizosphere microbiome of both wild and cultivated Fritillaria thunbergii Miq.

Fritillaria thunbergii is one of the most essential medicinal herbs in traditional Chinese medicine, widely cultivated in the eastern coastal regions of China, particularly Zhejiang Province. In recent years, intensive monoculture practices have disrupted soil microbial equilibrium and functional diversity, leading to severe challenges such as gray mold disease in cultivated F. thunbergii. The concept of rewilding plant microbiomes has gained prominence as a sustainable strategy to enhance plant resilience. This approach hinges on identifying ancestral beneficial microbiota from wild F. thunbergii populations in their native habitats. Consequently, wild and cultivated accessions from distinct ecological niches were collected for comparative analysis, including rhizosphere microbiome profiling, differential abundance modeling, and co-occurrence network reconstruction, to pinpoint keystone microbial taxa with potential health-promoting functions.