ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Microbe and Virus Interactions with Plants
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1615900
This article is part of the Research TopicRhizophagy and other cross-talks in RhizobiocomplexView all 4 articles
Pilot Investigation of the Rhizosphere Microbial Communities and Metabolism of Two Cultivars of Polygonatum cyrtonema Hua
Provisionally accepted
- 1Yunnan University, Kunming, China
- 2Chizhou Rural Revitalization Industry Development Co., Ltd., Chizhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Polygonatum cyrtonema Hua, a medicinal herb valued in traditional Chinese medicine, produces bioactive polysaccharides and saponins, exhibits intraspecific metabolic variations whose interactions with rhizosphere microbiota remain unexplored. As a pilot investigation, we characterized these linkages in two representative high-yield cultivars (JH1: bead-like tubers; JH2: L-shaped rhizomes) through integrated 16S rRNA/ITS sequencing and metabolomics. Bacterial communities showed conserved composition (Proteobacteria-dominated; shared core genera Candidatus Koribacter and Bradyrhizobium), whereas fungal assemblages diverged sharply between cultivars. JH1 rhizospheres enriched Hydnum, Collimyces, Ramariopsis and Coralloidiomyces, whereas JH2 favored Acremonium, Archaeospora, Didymosphaeria, Entoloma and Monacrosporium. Metabolomic profiling revealed tissue-driven specialization as the primary determinant, with tubers accumulated oleoyl ethylamide/DL-malic acid and roots preferentially storing DL-arginine. The core bacteria exhibited consistent negative association with organ-specific metabolites, whereas, fungal interactions diverged. JH1 enriched fungi positively associated with tuber oleoyl ethylamide and root DL-arginine but negatively with tuber DL-malic acid, while JH2-enriched taxa showed inverse relationships. The enriched fungal communities (average positive correlation coefficient 0.39) demonstrated stronger tissue-specific metabolite coordination than bacteria (average positive correlation coefficient 0.15), suggesting potential mycobiome-mediated regulation of medicinal compound partitioning. This preliminary dissection of cultivar-associated microbial-metabolite interplay may provide a mechanistic framework for optimizing P. cyrtonema cultivation through synthetic microbial consortia. However, future multi-location, multi-season studies with soil controls are needed to validate ecological generality.
Keywords: Polygonatum cyrtonema Hua, rhizosphere microbiota, fungal communities, Metabolites, microbial-metabolite interactions
Received: 23 May 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Dong, An, Qian, Gui and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yunjian Xu, Yunnan University, Kunming, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.