Inoculation Reduces the Incidence of Clubroot Disease in Chinese Cabbage by Regulating the Rhizosphere Microbial Community.

Clubroot is a disease of cruciferous crops that causes significant economic losses to vegetable production worldwide. We applied high-throughput amplicon sequencing technology to quantify the effect of LTR-2 inoculation on the rhizosphere community of Chinese cabbage ( subsp. cv. Jiaozhou) in a commercial production area. inoculation of cabbage reduced the incidence of clubroot disease by 45.4% ( < 0.05). The disease control efficacy (PDIDS) was 63%. This reduction in disease incidence and severity coincided with a drastic reduction in both the relative abundance of , the causative pathogen of cabbage clubroot disease, and its copy number in rhizosphere soil. Pathogenic fungi and were also negatively associated with inoculation according to co-occurrence network analysis. Inoculation drastically reduced the relative abundance of the dominant bacterial genera and , whilst increasing others including . Our results demonstrate that LTR-2 is an effective biological control agent for cabbage clubroot, which acts through modulation of the soil and rhizosphere microbial community.