Microbial community shifts association with physicochemical parameters: Visualizing enset bacterial wilt from different states of enset health.

Bacterial wilt of enset caused by Xanthomonas campestris is a devastating disease in Ethiopia, where enset is domesticated and served as a staple food for about 20 million people in the country. While enset is infected by bacteria, it shows different wilting stages. However, the microbial community shifts at the different stages of enset infection and associated physicochemical parameter changes remain poorly understood. This study was aimed to visualize the proportion of enset wilt bacterium from other microbial community and its association with physicochemical parameter at different states of enset health. Soil and enset (zero, first, second and third stages) samples were collected from three districts in Gamo Highlands for physicochemical and biological (culture dependent and16S rRNA gene sequence) analysis. The results of culture dependent analysis which has been complemented by 16S rRNA gene sequence confirmed that increasing trends were observed for Xanthomonadaceae, Pseudomonadaceae, Lactobacillaceae and Flavobacteriaceae, while Bacillaceae and Enterobacteriaceae showed progressive decrease from zero to the third stage. Particularly, the 16S rRNA data showed that Xanthomonadaceae increased significantly from zero to different (2.5 × 102 times at the onset of disease and 1.0-2.0 × 104 times at the second and third) stages of enset infection. Most physicochemical results showed that a decreasing trends from zero to third stage, while few parameters are showing an increasing trend. Moisture content (R2 ≥ 0.951, P ≤ 0.049) of the soil and plant samples positively influenced Xanthomonas abundance, while this bacterium showed a strongly negative significant correlation with pH (R2 ≥ -0.962, P ≤ 0.038), temperature (R2 ≥ -0.958, P ≤ 0.042), OM (R2 ≥ -0.952, P ≤ 0.048), and TN (R2 ≥ -0.951, P ≤ 0.049). A strongly negative significant correlation (R2 ≥ -0.948, P ≤ 0.050) was also observed between Xanthomonas and nutrients (K, Mg, Ca, and Cu). Overall, this study implies that different environmental factors found a key driving force of Xanthomonas proportional increment from low abundance at zero stage to higher abundance at the last stage of enset infection suggesting that considering these factors help to design an effective enset disease management strategy, for which further studies will be needed.