Investigation of the fungal community structures of imported wheat using high-throughput sequencing technology

This study introduced the application of high-throughput sequencing techniques to the investigation of microbial diversity in the field of plant quarantine. It examined the microbial diversity of wheat imported into China, and established a bioinformatics database of wheat pathogens based on high-throughput sequencing results. This study analyzed the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of fungi through Illumina Miseq sequencing to investigate the fungal communities of both seeds and sieve-through. A total of 758,129 fungal ITS sequences were obtained from ten samples collected from five batches of wheat imported from the USA. These sequences were classified into 2 different phyla, 15 classes, 33 orders, 41 families, or 78 genera, suggesting a high fungal diversity across samples. Apairwise analysis revealed that the diversity of the fungal community in the sieve-through is significantly higher than those in the seeds. Taxonomic analysis showed that at the class level, Dothideomycetes dominated in the seeds and Sordariomycetes dominated in the sieve-through. In all, this study revealed the fungal community composition in the seeds and sieve-through of the wheat, and identified key differences in the fungal community between the seeds and sieve-through.