ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Terrestrial Microbiology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1674216
This article is part of the Research TopicMicrobe-Environment Interaction Across Grassland Ecosystems: Soil Microbial Diversity, Plant-Microbe Interplay, and Ecosystem FunctionalityView all 6 articles
Insights into Microbiome-Triterpenoid Correlation in Poria cocos via Comparative Analysis of Sclerotial and Soil Microenvironments
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hunan Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine Resources, Changsha, China
- 2Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, Changsha, China
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Poria cocos (P. cocos) is a medicinal fungus renowned for its bioactive triterpenoids, particularly pachymic acid. This study systematically compared the microbial communities and pachymic acid distribution patterns between P. cocos and different soil microenvironments using integrated 16S rRNA/ITS1 sequencing and HPLC-QTOF-MS/MS analysis. The results revealed significantly lower microbial diversity in P. cocos compared to the surrounding soil, with a dominance of Proteobacteria and Ascomycota, along with specific enrichments of Burkholderia-Caballeronia-Paraburkholderia and Scytalidium. Pachymic acid was found to accumulate predominantly within the sclerotia, with trace amounts detectable in adjacent soils. Significant positive correlations were identified between pachymic acid and these enriched microbial taxa. These findings indicate that P. cocos forms a specialized microenvironment characterized by selective microbial enrichment associated with pachymic acid accumulation, offering valuable insights for optimizing cultivation strategies to improve its medicinal quality.
Keywords: Poria cocos, high-throughput sequencing, Pachymic acid, microbiome, Bacteria and Fungi
Received: 27 Jul 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zheng, Zhong, Pan, Xie, Zhang and Jin. 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: Jian Jin, Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, Changsha, China
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