Cultivation system and plant health influence root-associated bacterial community structure and interaction networks...

Strawberry is cultivated in both soil-based field and substrate-based soilless hydroponic systems, yet how cultivation context shapes root-associated bacterial communities and their interaction architecture remains unclear. We compared root-associated bacterial communities from field root-associated soil and hydroponic root-adhering substrate under asymptomatic and symptomatic conditions using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Cultivation system was the primary driver of community structure, clearly separating field and hydroponic samples. Field communities were enriched in Firmicutes and Actinobacteria, such as Bacillaceae and Nocardioidaceae, whereas hydroponic communities showed higher relative abundances of Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Planctomycetes, and Verrucomicrobia, including Chitinophagaceae and Sphingomonadaceae. Differential abundance and Random Forest analyses revealed consistent enrichment of Bacillus-associated ASVs in field samples, whereas asymptomatic and symptomatic communities showed greater compositional differentiation in hydroponic than in field samples.. Co-occurrence network analysis further demonstrated that hydroponic communities contained more taxa and interactions but exhibited lower density and clustering compared to field communities, indicating reduced structural cohesion. These findings demonstrate that cultivation system strongly influences both the composition and structural organization of strawberry root-associated bacterial communities, with implications for microbiome-informed disease management in intensive production systems.