2025/03/10 by Jyotsna Nepal, Rémy Guyoneaud, Fanny Guedea +11 · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Plant and fungal interactions
paper · doi:10.1094/pbiomes-08-24-0083-r
openalex publication_date 2025/03/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Endophytes inhabit plant tissues, offering various benefits to their hosts. Understanding their roles in sustainable agriculture is a key focus of research. Using 16S rRNA gene and fungal-specific ITS2 region amplicon sequencing, we investigated how 11 different potato cultivars and 3 different growing conditions influence the diversity of microbial endophytes in potato roots. We compared plants grown on two different soils in greenhouse conditions and plantlets grown in agar media (i.e., in vitro), representing the planting material without the effect of the soil microbiome. Our results revealed that growing conditions significantly influenced the alpha and beta diversity of endophytic bacteria. In plants grown in soils, the bacterial endophytic community was mainly represented by the Pseudomonadaceae family, whereas for in vitro plants, the Paenibacillaceae, a spore-forming bacteria family, was the main representative. The fungal community comprised many possible fungal pathogens, such as Colletotrichum, Fusarium, and Verticillium. For the endophytic fungi, both soil types and cultivars affected fungal diversity, and a stronger effect for cultivars was seen for fungi as compared with bacteria. Overall, our findings indicate that endophytic bacteria exhibit strong recruitment potential from soil communities, and the identity of cultivars has also influenced fungal dynamics in communities. These findings shed light on the intricate interactions among potato cultivars and soil microbiomes, which can affect the design of sustainable agricultural strategies. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .