Different community compositions between obligate and facultative oomycete plant parasites in a landscape-scale metabarcoding survey

Abstract

AbstractOomycetes are a ubiquitous protistan lineage including devastating crop parasites. Although their ecology in agrosystems has been widely studied, little is known of their distribution in natural and semi-natural ecosystems and how they respond to edaphic and environmental factors. We provide here a baseline of the diversity and distribution of soil oomycetes, classified by lifestyles (biotrophy, hemibiotrophy and saprotrophy), at the landscape scale in temperate grassland and forest. From 600 soil samples, we obtained 1148 operational taxonomy units representing ~ 20 million Illumina reads (region V4, 18S rRNA gene). We found a majority of hemibiotrophic plant pathogens, which are parasites spending part of their life cycle as saprotrophs after the death of the host. Overall both grassland and forest constitute an important reservoir of plant pathogens. Distance-based RDA models identified soil type and mineral soil C/N ratio as the most influential factors in shaping oomycete communities in grassland and forest. Edaphic conditions and human-induced management intensification in forest triggered opposite responses in the relative abundances of obligate biotrophs and hemibiotrophs, suggesting different ecological requirements of these two lifestyles.