Pumpkin powdery mildew disease severity influences the fungal diversity of the phyllosphere
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Agricultural Science
- Keywords
- disease severity, powdery mildew, Illumina MiSeq, phyllosphere microbiota, fungal community, community diversity
- Copyright
- © 2017 Zhang et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Pumpkin powdery mildew disease severity influences the fungal diversity of the phyllosphere. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3278v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3278v1
Abstract
Phyllosphere microbiota play a crucial role in plant-environment interactions and are influenced by biotic and abiotic factors. However, there is little research on how pathogen s affect the microbial community. In this study, we collected 16 pumpkin (Cucurbita moschata) leaf samples showing symptoms of powdery mildew disease with different disease severity levels ranging from L1 (least severe) to L4 (most severe). We examined the fungal community structure and diversity by Illumina MiSeq sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of ribosomal RNA genes. The fungal communities were dominated by members of the Basidiomycota and Ascomycota. The dominant genus was Podosphaera on the diseased leaves, which was the key pathogen responsible for the pumpkin powdery mildew. Ascomycota and Podosphaera increased in abundance as disease severity increased from L1 to L4, and were significantly more abundant than other microorganisms at disease severity L4 (P<0.05). The richness and diversity of the fungal community increased from L1 to L2, and then declined from L2 to L4, likely due to the biotic pressure at disease severity L4. Maintaining species richness in the phyllosphere will be an important part of managing disease control in this agroecological system and an essential step toward predictable biocontrol of powdery mildew in pumpkin.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.