Tomato growth stage modulates bacterial communities across different soil aggregate sizes and disease levels.

Soil aggregates contain distinct physio-chemical properties across different size classes. These differences in micro-habitats support varied microbial communities and modulate the effect of plant on microbiome, which affect soil functions such as disease suppression. However, little is known about how the residents of different soil aggregate size classes are impacted by plants throughout their growth stages. Here, we examined how tomato plants impact soil aggregation and bacterial communities within different soil aggregate size classes. Moreover, we investigated whether aggregate size impacts the distribution of soil pathogen and their potential inhibitors. We collected samples from different tomato growth stages: before-planting, seedling, flowering, and fruiting stage. We measured bacterial density, community composition, and pathogen abundance using qPCR and 16 S rRNA gene sequencing. We found the development of tomato growth stages negatively impacted root-adhering soil aggregation, with a gradual decrease of large macro-aggregates (1-2 mm) and an increase of micro-aggregates (<0.25 mm). Additionally, changes in bacterial density and community composition varied across soil aggregate size classes. Furthermore, the pathogen exhibited a preference to micro-aggregates, while macro-aggregates hold a higher abundance of potential pathogen-inhibiting taxa and predicted antibiotic-associated genes. Our results indicate that the impacts of tomatoes on soil differ for different soil aggregate size classes throughout different plant growth stages, and plant pathogens and their potential inhibitors have different habitats within soil aggregate size classes. These findings highlight the importance of fine-scale heterogeneity of soil aggregate size classes in research on microbial ecology and agricultural sustainability, further research focuses on soil aggregates level could help identify candidate tax involved in suppressing pathogens in the virtual micro-habitats.

Predominance of soil vs root effect in rhizosphere microbiota reassembly.

Rhizosphere community assembly is simultaneously affected by both plants and bulk soils and is vital for plant health. However, it is still unclear how and to what extent disease-suppressive rhizosphere microbiota can be constructed from bulk soil, and the underlying agents involved in the process that render the rhizosphere suppressive against pathogenic microbes remain elusive. In this study, the evolutionary processes of the rhizosphere microbiome were explored based on transplanting plants previously growing in distinct disease-incidence soils to one disease-suppressive soil. Our results showed that distinct rhizoplane bacterial communities were assembled on account of the original bulk soil communities with different disease incidences. Furthermore, the bacterial communities in the transplanted rhizosphere were noticeably influenced by the second disease-suppressive microbial pool, rather than that of original formed rhizoplane microbiota and homogenous nontransplanted rhizosphere microbiome, contributing to a significant decrease in the pathogen population. In addition, Spearman's correlations between relative abundances of bacterial taxa and the abundance of Ralstonia solanacearum indicated Anoxybacillus, Flavobacterium, Permianibacter and Pseudomonas were predicted to be associated with disease-suppressive function formation. Altogether, our results showed that bulk soil played an important role in the process of assembling and reassembling the rhizosphere microbiome of plants.