Shifts in community composition and co-occurrence patterns of phyllosphere fungi inhabiting Mussaenda shikokiana along an elevation gradient

Xin Qian; Liang Chen; Xiaoming Guo; Dan He; Miaomiao Shi; Dianxiang Zhang

doi:10.7717/peerj.5767

Shifts in community composition and co-occurrence patterns of phyllosphere fungi inhabiting Mussaenda shikokiana along an elevation gradient

PeerJ. 2018 Oct 12:6:e5767. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5767. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Xin Qian^{1

2}, Liang Chen³, Xiaoming Guo^{1

2}, Dan He⁴, Miaomiao Shi¹, Dianxiang Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Plant Resources Conservation and Sustainable Utilization, South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ CAS Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁴ Center for Ecological and Environmental Sciences, South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.

Abstract

The altitudinal effects on the distributions of phyllosphere fungal assemblages in conspecific plants remain poorly elucidated. To address this, phyllosphere fungal communities associated with Mussaenda shikokiana were investigated at four sites across a 350 m elevation gradient in a subtropical forest by employing Illumina metabarcoding of the fungal internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region. Our results demonstrated that phyllosphere fungal assemblages with a single host possessed high taxonomic diversity and multiple trophic guilds. OTU richness was significantly influenced by elevation. The elevation gradient also entailed distinct shifts in the community composition of phyllosphere fungi, which was significantly related to geographical distance and mean annual temperature (MAT). Additionally, comparison of phyllosphere fungal networks showed reduced connectivity with increasing elevation. Our data provide insights on the distribution and interactions of the phyllosphere fungal community associated with a single host along a short elevation gradient.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Elevation gradient; High-throughput sequencing; Mussaenda shikokiana; Phyllosphere fungi.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA13020504), Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. 2013FY111200), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (31570314 and U1603231). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.