Dissecting Disease-Suppressive Rhizosphere Microbiomes by Functional Amplicon Sequencing and 10× Metagenomics
Vittorio Tracanna, Adam Ossowicki, Marloes L. C. Petrus, Sam Overduin, Barbara R. Terlouw, George Lund, Serina L. Robinson, Sven Warris, Elio Schijlen, Gilles P. van Wezel, Jos M. Raaijmakers, Paolina Garbeva, Marnix H. Medema
Abstract
Soil-borne plant-pathogenic fungi continue to be a major threat to agriculture and horticulture. The genus Fusarium in particular is one of the most devastating groups of soilborne fungal pathogens for a wide range of crops. Our approach to develop novel sustainable strategies to control this fungal root pathogen is to explore and exploit an effective, yet poorly understood naturally occurring protection, i.e., disease-suppressive soils. After screening 28 agricultural soils, we recently identified four soils that were suppressive to root disease of wheat caused by Fusarium culmorum. We also confirmed, via sterilization and transplantation, that the microbiomes of these soils play a significant role in the suppressive phenotype. By adopting nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) functional amplicon screening of suppressive and conducive soils, we here show how computationally driven comparative analysis of combined functional amplicon and metagenomic data can unravel putative mechanisms underlying microbiome-associated plant phenotypes.