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Free keywords:
microbiome; neutral processes; niche processes; rhizosphere and phyllosphere; wheat domestication; wheat microbiota; wheat mycobiota
Abstract:
Domestication has led to substantial changes in plant physiology. How this anthropogenic intervention has contributed in altering the wheat microbiota is not well understood. Here, we investigated the role of ecological selection, drift, and dispersal in shaping the bacterial and fungal communities associated with domesticated wheat Triticum aestivum and two wild relatives, T. boeoticum and T. urartu. Our study shows that the bacterial and fungal microbiota of wild and domesticated wheat species follow distinct community assembly patterns. Further, we revealed a more prominent role of neutral processes in the assembly of the microbiota of domesticated wheat and propose that domestication has relaxed selective processes in the assembly of the wheat microbiota. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.