Root endophytic microbiome of Barley plants Raw sequence reads
In a greenhouse full factorial experiment, we investigated the effects of prothioconazole and fluoxastrobin fungicide irrigation, of inoculation of the pathogenic fungus Drechslera teres and of barley cultivars on plant growth and grain yield variables, and particularly on barley root endophytic communities. Our experimental design was an approach to real agriculture practice, where generally fungicides are irrigated prophylactic before occurrence of pathogenic fungi. Additionally, aphid abundance has been measured. 60 root samples with all treatment combinations were chosen for DNA-extraction, PCR amplification and metabarcoding. For beta diversity analysis, multivariate statistics had been performed to reduce the large data sets into few principal coordinates in a MDS-CAP ordination. We hypothesized that the fungicide treatment will affect alpha and beta diversity in bacterial and fungal endophyte communities. It was found, that the fungicide and Drechslera treatments had no significant effect on alpha and beta diversity of the endophytes, but barley cultivar showed to be a significant driver of beta diversity of bacterial and fungal barley root endophyte communities.