Accurate prediction of huanglongbing occurrence in citrus plants by machine learning-based analysis of symbiotic bacteria

Huanglongbing (HLB), the most prevalent citrus disease worldwide, is responsible for substantial yield and economic losses. Phytobiomes, which have critical effects on plant health, are associated with HLB outcomes. The development of a refined model for predicting HLB outbreaks based on phytobiome markers may facilitate early disease detection, thus enabling growers to minimize damages. Although some investigations have focused on differences in the phytobiomes of HLB-infected citrus plants and healthy ones, individual studies are inappropriate for generating common biomarkers useful for detecting HLB on a global scale. In this study, we therefore obtained bacterial information from several independent datasets representing hundreds of citrus samples from six continents and used these data to construct HLB prediction models based on 10 machine learning algorithms. We detected clear differences in the phyllosphere and rhizosphere microbiomes of HLB-infected and healthy citrus samples. Moreover, phytobiome alpha diversity indices were consistently higher for healthy samples. Furthermore, the contribution of stochastic processes to citrus rhizosphere and phyllosphere microbiome assemblies decreased in response to HLB. Comparison of all constructed models indicated that a random forest model based on 28 bacterial genera in the rhizosphere and a bagging model based on 17 bacterial species in the phyllosphere predicted the health status of citrus plants with almost 100% accuracy. Our results thus demonstrate that machine learning models and phytobiome biomarkers may be applied to evaluate the health status of citrus plants.