Microbial communities associated with the black morel Morchella sextelata cultivated in greenhouses

Abstract

Morels (Morchella spp.) are iconic edible mushrooms with a long history of human consumption. Some microbial taxa are hypothesized to be important in triggering the formation of morel primordia and development of fruiting bodies, thus, there is interest in the microbial ecology of these fungi. To identify and compare fungal and prokaryotic communities in soils where Morchella sextelata is cultivated in outdoor greenhouses, ITS and 16S rDNA high throughput amplicon sequencing and microbiome analyses were performed. Pedobacter, Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomonas, and Flavobacterium were found to comprise the core microbiome of M. sextelata ascocarps. These bacterial taxa were also abundant in the soil beneath growing fruiting bodies. A total of 29 bacterial taxa were found to be statistically associated to Morchella fruiting bodies. Bacterial community network analysis revealed high modularity with some 16S rDNA operational taxonomic unit clusters living in specialized fungal niches (e.g., pileus, stipe). Other fungi dominating the soil mycobiome beneath morels included Morchella, Phialophora, and Mortierella. This research informs understanding of microbial indicators and potential facilitators of Morchella ecology and fruiting body production.

Microbiome Community Structure and Functional Gene Partitioning in Different Micro-Niches Within a Sporocarp-Forming Fungus

“…T. ganbajun’ s pileipellis harbored higher bacterial diversity and functional genes than those in the hymenophore ( Figures 2 , 4 ), indicating distinct bacterial partitioning in the micro-niches of the outer layer of the fruiting body where the basidiospores are borne. Similarly, a higher bacterial diversity in pileus (compared to stipe) was identified in the edible mushroom of Morchella sextelata M. Kuo ( Benucci et al, 2019 ). The highest bacterial diversity was located in the context—a more internal sterile tissue in T. ganbajun ’s fruiting body ( Figure 2 ).…”

Crop Management Impacts the Soybean (Glycine max) Microbiome

“…Illumina MiSeq amplicon libraries were constructed with the ITS1F -ITS4 primer set to target the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of Fungi and the 515F -806R primer set to target the V4 region of the 16S rDNA of Prokaryotes (White et al, 1990;Gardes and Bruns, 1993;Caporaso et al, 2011). Libraries were prepared following a three step PCR protocol as described previously (Benucci et al, 2018(Benucci et al, , 2019Chen K.H. et al, 2018).…”

Build Your Own Mushroom Soil: Microbiota Succession and Nutritional Accumulation in Semi-Synthetic Substratum Drive the Fructification of a Soil-Saprotrophic Morel

“…It suggests a prospect of amending chemical agents antagonizing Cyanobacteria in combination with ammonium-removing microorganisms such as ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA), AOB, comammox (Xia et al, 2018), and anammox (You et al, 2020) into morel agriculture to potentially enhance the performance of morel fruiting body yield. The major bacterial phyla Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi, and Proteobacteria in the semi-synthetic substratum in this study (Figure 3A) were also dominant in the soil beneath the fruiting bodies of Morchella sextelata, another black morel species (Benucci et al, 2019). During the fructification period of Morchella rufobrunnea cultivated indoors, different profiles of bacterial communities were observed (Longley et al, 2019).…”

“…Different from the quasi-sterile lignocellulosic substrate to cultivate wood-decaying mushrooms such as Pleurotus ostreatus and Lentinus edodes ( Chang and Hayes, 2013 ), the soil substratum compulsory for M. importuna fructification is an outdoor ecosystem with natural microbiota. Indeed, previous studies provided some clues that soil microbiota associated with morel cultivation could affect the outcome of morel fructification ( Benucci et al, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2019 ). It is hypothesized that the morel mycelium and associated microbial cortege metabolize and accumulate specific nutrients in the substratum, and the accumulated nutrients were consumed later to support morel fructification.…”