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Contributed Talk

Session: : Mycorrhizae 1

COS 131-2 - Seasonal patterns in functional redundancy and complementarity in the quaking aspen fungal microbiome assessed using deep meta-transcriptomics

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
3:45 PM – 4:00 PM PDT
Location: D133-134
Abstract: Plant rhizosphere microbial communities harbor exceptionally high diversity and perform a multitude of functions for the plant including nutrient transfer and conferral of stress tolerance. It is unclear how broadly distributed these functions are across the many species in diverse natural communities. We also lack an understanding of the balance between functional redundancy and functional complementarity in microbiomes across environmental gradients. Belowground microbial functions are usually taken as bulk community measurements and are rarely resolved to the level of individual species. Meta-transcriptomic sequencing is able to gene expression patterns for whole communities and generate taxonomically resolved functional profiles. We used deep meta-transcriptomic sequencing to assess functional and taxonomic turnover of the quaking aspen root microbiome during the seasonal drought of 2021 across a spatial environmental gradient in the Uinta Mountains, Utah. We were able to taxonomically assign assembled genes to the genus level in many cases, allowing us to probe how widely distributed molecular functions are across taxa. This allowed us to identify relationships between taxonomic and functional diversity and quantify the number of unique and shared functions between fungal taxa. Our data show that species turnover across spatial and temporal environmental gradients is linked to some degree of functional turnover, while certain core functions are conversed despite community turnover. These findings demonstrate that fungal microbiomes are sensitive to environmental change but can also play a central role in plant acclimation to novel environmental conditions.