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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Terrestrial Microbiology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1452534

Plant community richness and foliar fungicides impact soil Streptomyces inhibition, resistance, and resource use phenotypes

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 University of Minnesota Twin Cities, St. Paul, United States
  • 2 Plant Science Research Unit, Agricultural Research Service (USDA), St. Paul, Minnesota, United States
  • 3 Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Bangkok, Thailand
  • 4 University of California, Riverside, Riverside, California, United States
  • 5 University of New Hampshire, Durham, North Carolina, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Plants serve as critical links between above-and below-ground microbial communitites, both influencing and being influenced by microbes in these two realms. Below-ground microbial communities are expected to respond to soil resource environments, which are mediated by the roots of plants that can, in turn, be influenced by the above-ground community of foliar endophytes. For instance, diverse plant communities deposit more, and more diverse, nutrients into the soil, and this deposition is often increased when foliar pathogens are removed. Differences in soil resources can alter soil microbial composition and phenotypes, including inhibitory capacity, resource use, and antibiotic resistance. In this work, we consider plots differing in plant richness and application of foliar fungicide, evaluating consequences on soil resource levels and root-associated Streptomyces phenotypes. Soil carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and organic matter were greater in samples from polyculture than monoculture, yet this increase was surprisingly offset when foliar fungal communities were disrupted. We find that Streptomyces phenotypes varied more between richness plots-with the Streptomyces from polyculture showing lower inhibitory capacity, altered resource-use profiles, and increased antibiotic resistance-than between subplots with/without foliar fungicide. Where foliar fungicide affected phenotypes, it did so differently in polyculture than in monoculture, for instance decreasing niche width and overlap in monoculture while increasing them in polyculture. No differences in phenotype were correlated with soil nutrient levels, suggesting 1 Michalska-Smith et al.Streptomyces phenotypes respond to fungicide, plant richness the need for further research looking more closely at soil resource diversity and particular compounds that were found to differ between treatments.

    Keywords: Soil nutrients, microbe-microbe interactions, phenotypes, Co-Evolution, phylogeny, plant diversity, soil ecology

    Received: 21 Jun 2024; Accepted: 27 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Michalska-Smith, Schlatter, Pombubpa, Castle, Grandy, Borer, Seabloom and Kinkel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Matthew Michalska-Smith, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, St. Paul, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.