NGS data reveals the phyllosphere microbiome of wheat plants infected by the fungal pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici

Abstract

The fungal pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici is the causal agent of Septoria tritici blotch (STB), a major wheat disease in Western Europe. Microorganisms inhabiting wheat leaves might act as beneficial, biocontrol or facilitating agents that could limit or stimulate the development of Z. tritici. Improving our understanding of microbial communities in the wheat phyllosphere would lead to new insights into STB management. This resource announcement provides fungal and bacterial metabarcoding datasets obtained by sampling wheat leaves differing in the presence of symptoms caused by Z. tritici. Tissues were sampled from three wheat commercial varieties on three sampling dates during a cropping season. Weeds around wheat fields were sampled as well. In total, more than 450 leaf samples were collected. The pathogen Z. tritici was quantified using qPCR. We provide the raw metabarcoding datasets, the Amplicon Sequence Variant (ASV) tables obtained after bioinformatic processing, the metadata associated to each sample (sampling date, wheat variety and tissue health condition), a preliminary descriptive analysis of the data, and the code used for bioinformatic and descriptive statistical analysis.

High-resolution profiling of bacterial and fungal communities using pangenome-informed taxon-specific long-read amplicons

“…The mycobiome, analyzed using the full-length ITS, was predominantly composed of the fungal genera Zymoseptoria and Cladosporium . This is broadly consistent with recent findings in wheat fields 25,27 . However, our dataset showed a higher abundance of Cladosporium .…”

“…The Pseudomonas-specific rpoD and transporter amplicons revealed a diverse assembly of species, primarily belonging to the P. fluorescens and P. syringae groups (Figure 1D and Supplementary Figure S1). The mycobiome analyzed using the ITS was dominated by the fungal genera Zymoseptoria and Cladosporium, broadly consistent with recent findings in wheat fields (Figure 1E and Supplementary Figure S1) (Barroso-Bergada et al, 2022).…”

“…As a proof-of-principle, we focus on the microbiome of wheat (Laino et al, 2015). The fungal microbiome of wheat is often dominated by the pathogenic fungus Zymoseptoria tritici causing septoria tritici blotch (Kerdraon et al, 2019;Barroso-Bergada et al, 2022). The bacterial microbiome is dominated by Gammaproteobacteria including the genus Pseudomonas both above and below ground (Chen et al, 2021;Kavamura et al, 2021).…”