Sophora alopecuroides L. has great medicinal and ecological value in northwestern China. The host and its microbiota are mutually symbiotic, collectively forming a holobiont, conferring beneficial effects to the plant. However, the analysis of diversity, mycobiota composition, and the ecological function of endophytic fungi in the holobiont of S. alopecuroides is relatively lacking. In this article, the fungal community profiling of roots, stems, leaves, and seeds of S. alopecuroides (at the fruit maturity stage) from Huamachi and Baofeng in Ningxia, China were investigated based on the ITS1 region, using high-throughput sequencing technology. As a result, a total of 751 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were obtained and further classified into 9 phyla, 27 classes, 66 orders, 141 families, 245 genera, and 340 species. The roots had the highest fungal richness and diversity, while the stems had the highest evenness and pedigree diversity. There also was a significant difference in the richness of the endophytic fungal community between root and seed (p < 0.05). The organ was the main factor affecting the community structure of endophytic fungi in S. alopecuroides. The genera of unclassified Ascomycota, Tricholoma, Apiotrichum, Alternaria, and Aspergillus made up the vast majority of relative abundance, which were common in all four organs as well. The dominant and endemic genera and biomarkers of endophytic fungi in four organs of S. alopecuroides were different and exhibited organ specificity or tissue preference. The endophytic fungi of S. alopecuroides were mainly divided into 15 ecological function groups, among which saprotroph was absolutely dominant, followed by mixotrophic and pathotroph, and the symbiotroph was the least. With this study, we revealed the diversity and community structure and predicted the ecological function of the endophytic fungi of S. alopecuroides, which provided a theoretical reference for the further development and utilization of the endophytic fungi resources of S. alopecuroides.

Disease and pest detection of grape foliage is essential for grape yield and quality. RGB image (RGBI), multispectral image (MSI), and thermal infrared image (TIRI) are widely used in the health detection of plants. In this study, we collected three types of grape foliage images with six common classes (anthracnose, downy mildew, leafhopper, mites, viral disease, and healthy) in the field. ShuffleNet V2 was used to build up detection models. According to the accuracy of RGBI, MSI, TIRI, and multi-source data concatenation (MDC) models, and a multi-source data fusion (MDF) decision-making method was proposed for improving the detection performance for grape foliage, aiming to enhance the decision-making for RGBI of grape foliage by fusing the MSI and TIRI. The results showed that 40% of the incorrect detection outputs were rectified using the MDF decision-making method. The overall accuracy of MDF model was 96.05%, which had improvements of 2.64%, 13.65%, and 27.79%, compared with the RGBI, MSI, and TIRI models using label smoothing, respectively. In addition, the MDF model was based on the lightweight network with 3.785 M total parameters and 0.362 G multiply-accumulate operations, which could be highly portable and easy to be applied.

Sophora alopecuroides L. is a traditional Chinese medicine used for the treatment of several different disease states including bacillary dysentery and enteritis. But importantly, it also plays a role as an anti-tumor agent. That said, little is known about the role endophytes play regarding the clinically bioactive metabolites in S. alopecuroides. In order to explore the effects of endophytic fungi on the accumulation, quality, and correlation in the content of the medicinal compounds, the structural diversity of endophytic fungi in S. alopecuroides was analyzed. The relationship between endophytes and quinolizidine alkaloids (QAs), housed within the seeds of S. alopecuroides, which were interpreted based on established methods of high-throughput sequencing and high-performance liquid chromatography. A total of 1,034,418 effective sequence reads and 257 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were obtained from 33 samples which were sourced from 11 different sampling sites and further classified into 9 phyla, 20 classes, 45 orders, 85 families, and 118 genera. Ascomycota was found to be the dominant phylum of endophytic fungi in S. alopecuroides, with a relative abundance ranging from 60.85 to 98.30%. Alternaria, Cladosporium, Filobasidium, and an unidentified Ascomycota were the core-shared endophytes, accounting for 49.96, 27.12, 14.83, and 7.88%, respectively. Correlation analysis showed that the Simpson’s diversity index of endophytic fungal community in S. alopecuroides was significantly positively correlated with the Oxymatrine (OMA) content in different areas, while the Chao and Shannoneven indexes were significantly negatively correlated with OMA. The endophytic fungi of Alternaria were positively correlated with the content of OMA, Oxysophocarpine (OSC), and total QAs. This study has mastered the endophytic fungi resources of S. alopecuroides, explored potential functional endophytic fungi, and provided a scientific basis for using biological fertilization strategies to improve the quality of S. alopecuroides.

Bacterial wilt caused by Ralstonia solanacearum is considered one of the most important diseases that cause economic losses to tomato. Currently, eco-friendly biocontrol agents have been increasingly considered as effective approaches to control tomato bacterial wilt. However, the specific mechanisms by which biocontrol bacteria with distinct functions exert their effects remain unclear. In this study, we employed a combination of amplicon sequencing, transcriptomics, and metabolomics analysis to investigate how Bacillus velezensis and Pseudomonas fluorescens affect the defense responses against R. solanacearum in tomato. We showed that the fermentation broth of these biocontrol agents inhibited the growth of R. solanacearum in vitro, and improves the ability of tomato plants against bacterial wilt. In general, different biocontrol agents protect plants from bacterial wilt in many ways, by recruiting specific microbial communities in rhizosphere soil and activating different synthetic/metabolic and signaling pathways. Collectively, our findings contribute to a more in-depth understanding in disease resistance mechanisms of biocontrol agents, and provide a theoretical foundation for the development of targeted strategies using beneficial microorganisms to suppress disease occurrence.

Fusarium nematophilum NQ8GII4 is an endophytic fungus isolated from the root of healthy wolfberry (Lycium barbarum). Previous studies have reported that NQ8GII4 could dwell in wolfberry roots and enhance the defense responses in wolfberry against root rot, which is caused by F. oxysporum. To further elucidate the molecular mechanism of wolfberry disease resistance induced by NQ8GII4, in the present study, we adopted RNA sequencing analysis to profile the transcriptome of wolfberry response to NQ8GII4 infestation over a time course of 3 and 7 days postinoculation. Gene ontology enrichment analysis revealed that differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were enriched in biological regulation, response to stimulus, signaling, detoxification, immune system process, transporter activity, electron carrier activity, transcription factor activity, nucleic acid binding transcription factor, and antioxidant activity. Through Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analysis, it was found that many of these DEGs were enriched in pathways related to plant–pathogen interactions, hormone signal transduction, and the phenylpropanoid biosynthesis pathway in wolfberry. This result suggested that innate immunity, phytohormone signaling, and numerous phenylpropanoid compounds comprise a complex defense network in wolfberry. Chloroplast 50S ribosomal proteins were consistently located at the core position of the response in wolfberry following infestation with NQ8GII4 analyzed by the protein–protein interaction network. This study elucidated the molecular mechanism underlying the interaction between NQ8GII4 and wolfberry, clarified the wolfberry immune response network to endophytic fungi infestation, identified candidate resistance genes in wolfberry, and provided a fundamental date for subsequent work.

ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters are involved in transporting multiple substrates, such as toxins, and may be important for the survival of Trichoderma when encountering biotic toxins. In this study, genome searching revealed that there are 44 ABC transporters encoded in the genome of Trichoderma asperellum. These ABC transporters were divided into six types based on three-dimensional (3D) structure prediction, of which four, represented by 39 ABCs, are involved in transport and the remaining two, represented by 5 ABCs, are involved in regulating translation. The characteristics of nucleotide-binding domain (NBD) are important in the identification of ABC proteins. Even though the 3D structures of the 79 NBDs in the 44 ABCs are similar, multiple sequence alignment showed they can be divided into three classes. In total, 794 motifs were found in the promoter regions of the 44 ABC genes, of which 541 were cis-regulators related to stress responses. To characterize how their ABCs respond when T. asperellum interact with fungi or plants, T. asperellum was cultivated in either minimal media (MM) control, C-hungry, N-hungry, or poplar medium (PdPap) to simulate normal conditions, competition with pathogens, interaction with pathogens, and interaction with plants, respectively. The results show that 17 of 39 transport ABCs are highly expressed in at least one condition, whereas four of the five translation-regulating ABCs are highly expressed in at least one condition. Of these 21 highly expressed ABCs, 6 were chosen for RT-qPCR expression under the toxin stress of phytopathogen Alternaria alternata, and the results show ABC01, ABC04, ABC05, and ABC31 were highly expressed and may be involved in pathogen interaction and detoxifying toxins from A. alternata.