Bacterial communities associated with the phyllosphere of apple trees (Malus domestica cv. Enterprise) grown under organic and conventional management were assessed to determine if increased biological food safety risks might be linked with the bacterial communities associated with either treatment. Libraries of 16S rRNA genes were generated from phyllosphere DNA extracted from a wash made from the surfaces of leaves and apples from replicated organic and conventional treatments. 16S rRNA gene libraries were analyzed with software designed to identify statistically significant differences between bacterial communities as well as shared and unique phylotypes. The identified diversity spanned eight bacterial phyla and 14 classes in the pooled organic and conventional libraries. Significant differences between organic and conventional communities were observed at four of six time points (P < 0.05). Despite the identification of significantly diverse microfloras associated with organic and conventional treatments, no detectable differences in the presence of potential enteric pathogens could be associated with either organic or conventional management. Neither of the bacterial genera most commonly associated with produce-related illness outbreaks (Salmonella and Escherichia) was observed in any of the libraries. The impressive bacterial diversity that was documented in this study provides a valuable contribution to our developing understanding of the total microbial ecology associated with the preharvest phyllospheres of food crops. The fact that organic and conventional phyllosphere bacterial communities were significantly different at numerous time points suggests that crop management methods may influence the bacterial consortia associated with the surfaces of fruits and vegetables.

An important data gap in our understanding of the phyllosphere surrounds the origin of the many microbes described as phyllosphere communities. Most sampling in phyllosphere research has focused on the collection of microbiota without the use of a control, so the opportunity to determine which taxa are actually driven by the biology and physiology of plants as opposed to introduced by environmental forces has yet to be fully realized. To address this data gap, we used plastic plants as inanimate controls adjacent to live tomato plants (phyllosphere) in the field with the hope of distinguishing between bacterial microbiota that may be endemic to plants as opposed to introduced by environmental forces. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicons to study bacterial membership at four time points, we found that the vast majority of all species-level operational taxonomic units were shared at all time-points. Very few taxa were unique to phyllosphere samples. A higher taxonomic diversity was consistently observed in the control samples. The high level of shared taxonomy suggests that environmental forces likely play a very important role in the introduction of microbes to plant surfaces. The observation that very few taxa were unique to the plants compared to the number that were unique to controls was surprising and further suggests that a subset of environmentally introduced taxa thrive on plants. This finding has important implications for improving our approach to the description of core phytobiomes as well as potentially helping us better understand how foodborne pathogens may become associated with plant surfaces.

The study shows that low amounts of aleurone-enriched bread resulted in equivalent plasma levels of ferulic acid as wholegrain bread. This could suggest that, if the absorbed phenolic metabolites after wholegrain product intake exert health benefits, equal levels could be reached through the consumption of lower doses of refined products enriched in aleurone fraction.