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Contributed Talk

Session: : Biodiversity: Effects Of Global Change 3

COS 50-5 - Elevated CO2 drives community and network structural change within foliar microbiomes of soybean

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
9:00 AM – 9:15 AM PDT
Location: B114
Abstract:

Microbiomes within plants can play large roles in determining responses to stress or perturbation, increasingly common in a rapidly changing world. For example, foliar endophytes are known to increase stress tolerance to drought and decrease herbivory among many other effects. How these microbes are likely to respond to global change themselves is poorly understood. Global changes, such as increased atmospheric CO2, which can influence host plant physiological processes, have the potential to directly and indirectly alter microbiome community structure. Though these microbiome-level shifts may have large effects on their host, to date, our understanding of how microbial systems will fare under global change is not well known. Here, we assessed community and network structure of bacterial and fungal phyllosphere microbiomes within soybean (Glycine max). We created elevated and ambient CO2 treatments at the USDA SoyFACE experimental array which mimics levels of CO2 predicted for the middle of this century. We censused leaf microbiome communities within mature, undamaged leaves using metabarcoding approaches. Our preliminary findings suggest that fungal community structure differed between soybean plants grown in elevated and ambient CO2 conditions while bacterial communities between the two conditions did not. Additionally, co-occurrence networks of both fungal and bacterial communties in the elevated CO2 treatment exhibited marked changes compared to the ambient networks. Overall, our findings show that anthropogenic change, such as elevated CO2, can cause profound shifts in how communities of microbes assemble within their plant host. In turn, this may have implications for how well these microbiomes can buffer their hosts from ongoing global change. Our findings may aid those developing agro-ecological strategies using microbes to improve host traits of cash crops, which necessitates better understanding of the drivers of microbiome community structure. Through their impacts on host fitness, microbial shifts in response to climate change–like those we found in this study–could potentially act to shape macroecological and ecosystem-level effects.

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