Microbiome Analysis of Wheat and Its Wild Relatives.

Microbiomes are diverse assemblages of endophytic and free-living microorganisms that can confer competitive advantages to their plant hosts such as water acquisition, nutrient mobilization, drought tolerance, salt tolerance, and disease resistance. Plant domestication and selective breeding have altered the composition of these plant-microbe interactions in several crops. It is thought that the progenitors of the A, B, and D genomes in modern hexaploid wheat manage environmental stress in their native environment by establishing symbioses with a consortium of beneficial microbes. However, these microbial communities are not well understood. The goal of this study is to better understand the “core” community of microbes in wild wheat relatives and how they differ from the microbiome of cultivated wheat. This study compares the bacterial and fungal taxa found in the leaves, roots, and rhizosphere of three accessions of hard winter wheat and 11 wild relatives. These plants and the agricultural soil they inhabit were sampled from a randomized complete block design with two replications, grown in well-watered and water-limited treatments in Fort Collins, Colorado. DNA was extracted and next generation amplicon sequencing of the 16S-V4 (bacterial) and ITS2 (fungal) rRNA genes provided the copy numbers of the operational taxonomic units in each sample. Results will be presented and discussed.