The ecology of total fungal communities in grapevine is so far largely derived from the studies on culture-dependent methods or cultivation-independent rDNA approaches. Sequencing the ribosomal RNA transcripts (rRNA) would rather reveal the functionally and metabolically active important taxa of the fungal community and provide insights into its activity in the wood. The present study investigated changes in the potentially active fungal communities of internal grapevine wood after Hot-Water Treatment (HWT) in planting material from Czech Republic and Spain at two different moments of the propagation process and from two plant zones. We examined fungal communities using both traditional microbiological approach and highthroughput amplicon sequencing (HTAS) of internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region in extracted total RNA. HTAS from metatranscriptomic RNA increased the resolution of the fungal community analysis and revealed a highly diverse mycoflora of grapevine wood compared to the traditional method. Fungal diversity differed between grapevine genotypes and showed a temporal variation over the vegetative period. Grapevine planting materials exhibited high fungal diversity after HWT, which demonstrates that the HWT process does not sterilize the internal wood of grapevine. HWT reduced the infection caused by fungal trunk disease pathogens but was not completely effective in eliminating their growth. This study provides important and practically useful insights into dynamics of active fungal communities in hotwater treated plants and represents the first approach to study active fungal communities on grapevine grafted plants by comparing traditional and next-generation sequencing methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.