DOI: 10.5061/dryad.98sf7m0nh
title: Data from the fungal phyllosphere of Mediterranean plant species

description: The phyllosphere is a wide and complex ecosystem that provides key support
 for microbial diversity. Fungal communities inhabiting the leaf are
 functionally variable and play important roles on plant performance.
 Factors conditioning the arrival and colonization of fungal communities
 will determine the phyllosphere fungal composition. Plant identity, leaf
 functional traits and host plant phylogeny have been shown to be
 regulators of the microbial colonization of the leaves and can be
 considered as biotic filters determining the assembly of phyllosphere
 fungal communities. By high-throughput sequencing, we analysed the
 phyllosphere fungal communities from 38 Mediterranean woody plant species
 in two forests of the south-eastern Iberian Peninsula. We analysed the
 effect of plant species and site on fungal community composition. We also
 tested the effect of leaf functional traits and plant phylogeny on plant
 species differences in their fungal communities, and on the structure of
 the plant-fungus interaction network. Plant species account for a larger
 proportion than site in the variability of the composition of phyllosphere
 fungal communities. Leaf traits and host phylogeny influence the arrival
 and colonization of phyllosphere fungal communities across plant species.
 Plants with pubescent leaves and phylogenetically closer harbour more
 similar communities of decomposers, pathogens and epiphytes. Leaf habit
 (i.e., evergreen vs. deciduous) also influences the community composition
 of decomposer and epiphytic fungi. Leaf carbon, leaf water content and
 leaf mass per area affect differentially each functional guild.
 Plant-fungus interaction networks present a modular structure in which
 plants belonging to the same module share more fungal species and are
 phylogenetically closer. We provide evidence that even though phyllosphere
 fungal communities are complex ecosystems, fungi with contrasting
 relationships with the plant (decomposers, epiphytes and pathogens)
 respond similarly to a common subset of leaf traits that impose physical
 limitations to the assembly of phyllosphere fungal communities. 
description: We selected 27 plant species
 from the Mediterranean mixed forests. A total of 276 leaf samples from 138
 individual plants were dried with sterilized silica gel and kept at 4ºC
 until processing. Molecular characterization of fungal communities
 is fully explained in Suppl. Material S2. Briefly, extracted DNA were
 subjected to Illumina NovaSeq sequencing using the fungal-specific primers
 ITS3 and ITS4. The library preparation and the Illumina NovaSeq run were
 carried out by AllGenetics and Biology SL (www.allgenetics.eu). The bioinformatic analysis included removing sequencing primers and quality filtering of raw sequencing, estimating error rates and inferring of Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs). Taxonomic assignment was determined for each ASV against the UNITE database v. 8.2., complemented with representative sequences of the plant genera involved in the study. ASVs were clustered (97%) into Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) that resemble species level. Finally, 1,462 OTUs and 7,173,784 reads were obtained. Fungal functional guilds were determined by matching OTUs’ assigned genera and the genus-guild database FungalTraits. 
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