Collaborative environmental DNA sampling from petal surfaces of flowering cherry Cerasus × yedoensis ‘Somei-yoshino’ across the Japanese archipelago
Published in Journal of Plant Research, 2018
Cerasus × yedoensis ‘Somei-yoshino’ is a common cherry blossoms tree in Japan. The widespread clone of the single species across the country provides excellent opportunities to investigate the composition of the microbiome and its interaction with its surrounding environment. As a pilot project of such an analysis, we collected 577 environmental DNA samples via crowd sourcing among participants of a scientific conference and characterized the composition of microbial species on petal surfaces.

Reference: T. Ohta, T. Kawashima, N. O. Shinozaki, A. Dobashi, S. Hiraoka, T. Hoshino, K. Kanno, T. Kataoka, S. Kawashima, M. Matsui, W. Nemoto, S. Nishijima, N. Suganuma, H. Suzuki, Y. Taguchi, Y. Takenaka, Y. Tanigawa, M. Tsuneyoshi, K. Yoshitake, Y. Sato, R. Yamashita, K. Arakawa, W. Iwasaki, Collaborative environmental DNA sampling from petal surfaces of flowering cherry Cerasus × yedoensis ‘Somei-yoshino’ across the Japanese archipelago. J Plant Res. 131, 709-717 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10265-018-1017-x