Predominance of soil vs root effect in rhizosphere microbiota reassembly

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rhizosphere community assembly is simultaneously affected by both plants and bulk soils and is vital for plant health. However, it is still unclear how and to what extent disease-suppressive rhizosphere microbiota can be constructed from bulk soil, and the underlying agents involved in the process that render the rhizosphere suppressive against pathogenic microbes remain elusive. In this study, the evolutionary processes of the rhizosphere microbiome were explored based on transplanting plants previously growing in distinct disease-incidence soils to one disease-suppressive soil. Our results showed that distinct rhizoplane bacterial communities were assembled on account of the original bulk soil communities with different disease incidences. Furthermore, the bacterial communities in the transplanted rhizosphere were noticeably influenced by the second disease-suppressive microbial pool, rather than that of original formed rhizoplane microbiota and homogenous nontransplanted rhizosphere microbiome, contributing to a significant decrease in the pathogen population. In addition, Spearman's correlations between relative abundances of bacterial taxa and the abundance of Ralstonia solanacearum indicated Anoxybacillus, Flavobacterium, Permianibacter and Pseudomonas were predicted to be associated with disease-suppressive function formation. Altogether, our results showed that bulk soil played an important role in the process of assembling and reassembling the rhizosphere microbiome of plants.