Disease Occurrence and Climatic Factors Jointly Structure Pomelo Leaf Fungal Succession in Disturbed Agricultural Ecosystem

Abstract

For perennial plants, newly emerged organs are fresh hot spots for environmental microbes to occupy and assemble to form mature microbial communities. In the microbial community, some commensal fungi can play important roles in microbial succession, thus significantly improving host plant growth and disease resistance. However, their participating patterns in microbial assembly and succession remain largely unknown. In this study, we profiled the fungal community and found a similar fungal succession pattern of spring-emerged leaves from March to October in two pomelo orchards. Specifically, the fungal species, tracked on the old leaves, dominated the spring leaves after emergence and then decreased in relative abundance. This reduction in priority effects on the spring leaves was then followed by an increase in the number of observed species, Shannon and phylogenetic diversity indices, and the pathogen-associated fungal groups. In addition, we found that the temporal fungal succession on the spring leaves highly correlated with the disease occurrence in the orchards and with the temperature and precipitation variation from spring to summer. Of the pathogen-associated fungal groups, an increase in the relative abundance of Mycosphaerellaceae, hosting the causal agent of citrus greasy spot, correlated with the occurrence of the disease, while the relative abundance of Diaporthaceae, hosting the causal agent of melanose, was extremely low during the fungal succession. These results confirm that the two kinds of pathogen-associated fungal groups share different lifestyles on citrus, and also suggest that the study of temporal fungal succession in microbial communities can add to our understanding of the epidemiology of potential plant pathogens.