Impact of deltamethrin on the endophytic fungal community of a Chinese cabbage, Brassica chinensis

ABSTRACT

Endophytic fungi, being closely associated with their host plants, are an important part of the ecosystem and food web. In modern agriculture, pesticides are widely used. The impact of pesticides on the endophytic fungal community of crops remains poorly understood. In this paper, Chinese cabbage Brassica chinensis, a popular leafy vegetable consumed worldwide, was selected for evaluating the potential effects of a pesticide, deltamethrin, on the endophytic fungal community. By culture method, 195 endophytic fungal strains classified into 39 taxa and 186 strains classified into 30 taxa, respectively, were isolated from the pesticide-treated and untreated B. chinensis samples. Sirodesmium spp. were the predominant endophytic fungi from both samples. The colonisation rates of endophytic fungi of the treated and the untreated samples were not significantly different, as determined by one-way analysis of variance (p > .05). The Shannon diversity indexes (H′) were close, being 2.216 and 2.152, respectively. However, the endophyte compositions of the treated and the untreated samples were significantly different (p < .01) by the canonical correspondence analysis. The similarity coefficient of the endophyte assembles was only 29.0%. Our results indicate that the application of deltamethrin lead to the change of the endophytic fungal assemble in B. chinensis.

KEYWORDS:

• Endophytic fungi
• pesticide
• Brassica chinensis
• diversity
• endophytic community

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the fund of National Nature Science Foundation of China [Project number 31300067], the Major Projects of Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China [grant number 15KJA180002], the Technology Innovation Fund for Technology Enterprises of Jiangsu Province [grant number BC2012068], the Science and Technology Project of Xuzhou [grant number KC14N0068], and the Scientific Research Foundation of Jiangsu Normal University [grant number 13XLR011].