Pathogenic Fungi Communities in Contrasted Yam Field Soils are Dominated by The Genus Fusarium in Centre Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

Below-ground pathogenic fungi of yam, a globally important food crop are shown to be responsible of field and storage diseases and as such are important threats to yam health. However, yam soil pathogenic fungi community composition and soil determinants remain unclear. Here, we explored the effects of soil physicochemical characteristics on soil fungal phytopathogens in contrasted yam fields. Illumina miseq was used to characterize pathogenic fungi communities in yam field soils. In this work, we hypothesise that pathogenic community composition could be linked to specific physicochemical properties within yam contrasted soils. Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) and variance partitioning were used to identify the soil properties that significantly influence pathogenic fungi community compositions within the three sites in a yam production zone. The results have shown that despite the fact that the three sites exhibited contrasted soils grouped in two types according to physicochemical parameters, four ubiquitous genera including Fusarium, Penicillium, Aspergillus and Trichoderma were identified within pathogenic fungi communities in yam field soils, with Fusarium as the most dominant core genus. Soil type determined the distribution of pathogenic fungi communities in yam field soils, and this effect was attributed to soil properties related to yam soil cation exchange capacity (CEC) and silt content as well as three micronutrients including Na, N and total phosphorus.