Pathological Impact on the Phyllosphere Microbiota of Artemisia argyi by Haze

The pathological impact of haze upon the phyllosphere microbiota awaits investigation. A moderate degree of haze environment and a clean control were selected in Chengdu, China. Artemisia argyi, a ubiquitously distributed and extensively applied Chinese herb, was also chosen for experiment. Total genome DNA was extracted from leaf samples, and for metagenome sequencing, an Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform was applied. The results showed that the gene numbers of phyllosphere microbiota derived from haze leaves were lower than those of the clean control. The phyllosphere microbiota derived from both haze and clean groups shared the same top ten phyla; the abundances of Proteobacteria, Actinomycetes and Anorthococcuso of the haze group were substantially increased, while Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes decreased. At the genus level, the abundances of Nocardia, Paracoccus, Marmoricola and Knoelia from haze leaves were markedly increased, while the yeasts were statistically decreased. KEGG retrieval demonstrated that the functional genes were most annotated to metabolism. An interesting find of this work is that the phyllosphere microbiota responsible for the synthesis of primary and secondary metabolites in A. argyi were significantly increased under a haze environment. Relatively enriched genes annotated by eggNOG belong to replication, recombination and repair, and genes classified into the glycoside hydrolase and glycosyltransferase enzymes were significantly increased. In summary, we found that both structure and function of phyllosphere microbiota are globally impacted by haze, while primary and secondary metabolites responsible for haze tolerance were considerably increased. These results suggest an adaptive strategy of plants for tolerating and confronting haze damage.