ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2522-7909
Current Organisation
University of California, Berkeley
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 06-06-2021
DOI: 10.1111/NPH.17457
Abstract: Latitudinal gradients provide opportunities to better understand soil fungal community assembly and its relationship with vegetation, climate, soil and ecosystem function. Understanding the mechanisms underlying community assembly is essential for predicting compositional responses to changing environments. We quantified the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic processes in structuring soil fungal communities using patterns of community dissimilarity observed within and between 12 natural forests and related these to environmental variation within and among sites. The results revealed that whole fungal communities and communities of arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi consistently exhibited ergent patterns but with less ergence for ectomycorrhizal fungi at most sites. Within those forests, no clear relationships were observed between the degree of ergence within fungal and plant communities. When comparing communities at larger spatial scales, among the 12 forests, we observed distinct separation in all three fungal groups among tropical, subtropical and temperate climatic zones. Soil fungal β‐ ersity patterns between forests were also greater when comparing forests exhibiting high environmental heterogeneity. Taken together, although large‐scale community turnover could be attributed to specific environmental drivers, the differences among fungal communities in soils within forests was high even at local scales.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 15-09-2021
DOI: 10.1186/S40168-021-01138-2
Abstract: The plant microbiome is an integral part of the host and increasingly recognized as playing fundamental roles in plant growth and health. Increasing evidence indicates that plant rhizosphere recruits beneficial microbes to the plant to suppress soil-borne pathogens. However, the ecological processes that govern plant microbiome assembly and functions in the below- and aboveground compartments under pathogen invasion are not fully understood. Here, we studied the bacterial and fungal communities associated with 12 compartments (e.g., soils, roots, stems, and fruits) of chili pepper ( Capsicum annuum L.) using licons (16S and ITS) and metagenomics approaches at the main pepper production sites in China and investigated how Fusarium wilt disease (FWD) affects the assembly, co-occurrence patterns, and ecological functions of plant-associated microbiomes. The licon data analyses revealed that FWD affected less on the microbiome of pepper reproductive organs (fruit) than vegetative organs (root and stem), with the strongest impact on the upper stem epidermis. Fungal intra-kingdom networks were less stable and their communities were more sensitive to FWD than the bacterial communities. The analysis of microbial interkingdom network further indicated that FWD destabilized the network and induced the ecological importance of fungal taxa. Although the diseased plants were more susceptible to colonization by other pathogenic fungi, their below- and aboveground compartments can also recruit potential beneficial bacteria. Some of the beneficial bacterial taxa enriched in the diseased plants were also identified as core taxa for plant microbiomes and hub taxa in networks. On the other hand, metagenomic analysis revealed significant enrichment of several functional genes involved in detoxification, biofilm formation, and plant-microbiome signaling pathways (i.e., chemotaxis) in the diseased plants. Together, we demonstrate that a diseased plant could recruit beneficial bacteria and mitigate the changes in reproductive organ microbiome to facilitate host or its offspring survival. The host plants may attract the beneficial microbes through the modulation of plant-microbiome signaling pathways. These findings significantly advance our understanding on plant-microbiome interactions and could provide fundamental and important data for harnessing the plant microbiome in sustainable agriculture.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-10-2015
DOI: 10.1111/NPH.13068
Abstract: Environmental selection and dispersal limitation are two of the primary processes structuring biotic communities in ecosystems, but little is known about these processes in shaping soil microbial communities during secondary forest succession. We examined the communities of ectomycorrhizal ( EM ) fungi in young, intermediate and old forests in a C hinese subtropical ecosystem, using 454 pyrosequencing. The EM fungal community consisted of 393 operational taxonomic units ( OTU s), belonging to 21 EM fungal lineages, in which three EM fungal lineages and 11 EM fungal OTU s showed significantly biased occurrence among the young, intermediate and old forests. The EM fungal community was structured by environmental selection and dispersal limitation in old forest, but only by environmental selection in young, intermediate, and whole forests. Furthermore, the EM fungal community was affected by different factors in the different forest successional stages, and the importance of these factors in structuring EM fungal community dramatically decreased along the secondary forest succession series. This study suggests that different assembly mechanisms operate on the EM fungal community at different stages in secondary subtropical forest succession.
Publisher: American Society for Microbiology
Date: 07-2015
DOI: 10.1128/CMR.00134-14
Abstract: Staphylococcus aureus is a major human pathogen that causes a wide range of clinical infections. It is a leading cause of bacteremia and infective endocarditis as well as osteoarticular, skin and soft tissue, pleuropulmonary, and device-related infections. This review comprehensively covers the epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical manifestations, and management of each of these clinical entities. The past 2 decades have witnessed two clear shifts in the epidemiology of S. aureus infections: first, a growing number of health care-associated infections, particularly seen in infective endocarditis and prosthetic device infections, and second, an epidemic of community-associated skin and soft tissue infections driven by strains with certain virulence factors and resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. In reviewing the literature to support management strategies for these clinical manifestations, we also highlight the paucity of high-quality evidence for many key clinical questions.
Location: United States of America
Location: China
No related grants have been discovered for Cheng Gao.