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Plant Grafting Shapes Complexity and Co-occurrence of Rhizobacterial Assemblages

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Abstract

Grafting is a basic technique which is widely used to increase yield and enhance biotic and abiotic stress tolerance in plant production. The diversity and interactions of rhizobacterial assemblages shaped by grafting are important for the growth of their hosts but remain poorly understood. To test the hypothesis that plant grafting shapes complexity and co-occurrence of rhizobacterial assemblage, four types of plants, including ungrafted bottle gourd (B), ungrafted watermelon (W), grafted watermelon with bottle gourd rootstock (W/B), and grafted bottle gourd with watermelon rootstock (B/W), were cultivated in two soil types in a greenhouse, and the rhizosphere bacterial communities were analyzed by 16S rRNA gene high-throughput sequencing. Both the soil type and grafting significantly influenced the bacterial community composition. Grafting increased bacterial within-sample diversity in both soils. Core enriched operational taxonomic units (OTUs) in the W/B rhizosphere compared with the other three treatments (B, W, and B/W) were mainly affiliated with Alphaproteobacteria, Deltaproteobacteria, and Bacteroidetes, which are likely related to methanol oxidation, methylotrophy, fermentation, and ureolysis. Co-occurrence network analysis proved that grafting increased network complexity, including the number of nodes, edges, and modules. Moreover, grafting strengthened the structural robustness of the network in the rhizosphere, while ungrafted watermelon had the lowest network robustness. Homogeneous selection played a predominant role in bacterial community assembly, and the contribution of dispersal limitation was increased in grafted watermelon with bottle gourd rootstock. Grafting increased the diversity and transformed the network topology of the bacterial community, which indicated that grafting could improve species coexistence in the watermelon rhizosphere.

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Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Chen Zhu and Yang Song for their assistance with the DNA extraction and bio-informatic analysis and also to the staff of the Nanjing Institute of Vegetable Science for providing seedlings.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (31772398), the Innovative Research Team Development Plan of the Ministry of Education of China (IRT_17R56), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (KYT201802).

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  1. Jiangsu Provincial Key Lab for Organic Solid Waste Utilization, National Engineering Research Center for Organic-based Fertilizers, Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Solid Organic Waste Resource Utilization, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, 210095, China

    Yang Ruan, Tingting Wang, Shiwei Guo, Ning Ling & Qirong Shen

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Ruan, Y., Wang, T., Guo, S. et al. Plant Grafting Shapes Complexity and Co-occurrence of Rhizobacterial Assemblages. Microb Ecol 80, 643–655 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-020-01532-7

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