Tracking the microbiota along strawberry’s life cycle provides new insights into food health and safety

Description

The assembly of the plant microbiome has been identified as important to growth and health. However, this process is plant-specific and especially for fruit microbiome assembly less understood. Therefore, we analysed the strawberry microbiome in different microhabitats and cultivars within the whole life cycle using high-throughput sequencing and quantitative PCR. Strawberry plants carried a highly diverse microbiota, therein the bacterial families Sphingomonadaceae (25%), Pseudomonadaceae (17%) and Burkholderiaceae (11%); and fungal family Mycosphaerella (45%) were most abundant. All microhabitats were colonized by high bacterial and fungal abundances (107-1010 per g fresh weight) and species (6049 + 1501 ASVs); both were higher for belowground than for aboveground organs. Organ type was the main driver of microbial diversity, structure, and abundance (bacterial: 41% and fungal: 59.5%) when compared to the strawberry cultivar (1.6% and 2.2%). Along the whole life cycle, we identified low occurrence of microbiota transfer from soil through the rhizosphere to the phyllosphere. During fruit development, we observed the highest microbial transfer from leaves, flowers, and immature fruits to ripe fruits along with increasing abundances and diversity. Postharvest, in fruits under cold storage, microbial diversity decreased while abundance increased. Development of postharvest decay by Botrytis cinerea decreased diversity as well and induced a reduction of Sphingomonas and Mycosphaerella. Our findings provide novel insights into strawberry microbiome assembly and highlight the importance of microbiota transfer during fruit development and storage with implications for food health and safety.

Period	5 Jul 2021
Event title	25th NAWI Graz DocDay
Event type	Conference
Location	Graz, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National