Dynamics of the soil microbial community associated with Morchella cultivation: diversity, assembly mechanism and yield prediction

Yihong Yue; Haibo Hao; Qian Wang; Tingting Xiao; Yuchen Zhang; Qun Chen; Hui Chen; Jinjing Zhang

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2024.1345231

Dynamics of the soil microbial community associated with Morchella cultivation: diversity, assembly mechanism and yield prediction

Front Microbiol. 2024 Feb 15:15:1345231. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1345231. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Yihong Yue¹, Haibo Hao^{1

2}, Qian Wang¹, Tingting Xiao¹, Yuchen Zhang¹, Qun Chen³, Hui Chen¹, Jinjing Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ National Research Center for Edible Fungi Biotechnology and Engineering, Key Laboratory of Applied Mycological Resources and Utilization, Ministry of Agriculture, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Agricultural Genetics and Breeding, Institute of Edible Fungi, Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Shanghai, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering and Fudan Center for Genetic Diversity and Designing Agriculture, Institute of Plant Biology, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
³ School of Biology Food and Environment, Hefei University, Hefei, China.

Abstract

Introduction: The artificial cultivation of morels has been a global research focus owing to production variability. Understanding the microbial ecology in cultivated soil is essential to increase morel yield and alleviate pathogen harm.

Methods: A total of nine Morchella cultivation experiments in four soil field types, forest, paddy, greenhouse, and orchard in Shanghai city were performed to determine the potential ecological relationship between Morchella growth and soil microbial ecology.

Results: Generally, significant variation was observed in the soil microbial diversity and composition between the different experimental field types. The niche width analysis indicated that the bacterial habitat niche breadth was significantly greater than the fungal community width, which was further confirmed by a null model that revealed that homogeneous selection could explain 46.26 and 53.64% of the variance in the bacterial and fungal assemblies, respectively. Moreover, the neutral community model revealed that stochastic processes dominate the bacterial community in forests and paddies and both the bacterial and fungal communities in orchard crops, whereas deterministic processes mostly govern the fungal community in forests and paddies and both the bacterial and the fungal communities in greenhouses. Furthermore, co-occurrence patterns were constructed, and the results demonstrated that the dynamics of the soil microbial community are related to fluctuations in soil physicochemical characteristics, especially soil potassium. Importantly, structural equation modeling further demonstrated that the experimental soil type significantly affects the potassium content of the soil, which can directly or indirectly promote Morchella yield by inhibiting soil fungal richness.

Discussion: This was the first study to predict morel yield through soil potassium fertilizer and soil fungal community richness, which provides new insights into deciphering the importance of microbial ecology in morel agroecosystems.

Keywords: assembly processes; fungal richness; microbial community; morel cultivation; soil potassium; structural equation modeling (SEM).

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by Shanghai Agriculture Applied Technology Development Program of China (Grant No. 2021-02-08-00-12-F00786).