Asymmetric outcome of community coalescence of seed and soil microbiota during early seedling growth

Seed microbial community constitutes a primary inoculum for plant microbiota assembly. Still, the persistence of seed microbiota when seeds encounter soil during plant emergence and early growth is barely documented. Here, we characterized the interchange event or coalescence of seed and soil microbiota and how it structured seedling bacterial and fungal communities. We performed eight contrasted coalescence events to identify drivers influencing seedling microbiota assembly: four seed lots of two Brassica napus genotypes were sown in two soils of contrasted diversity. We found that seedling root and stem microbiota were influenced by soil diversity but not by initial seed microbiota composition. A strong selection on the two-source communities occurred during microbiota assembly, with only 8-32% of soil taxa and 0.8-1.4% of seed-borne taxa colonizing seedlings. The recruitment of seedling microbiota came mainly from soil (35-72% of diversity) and not from seeds (0.3-15%). The outcome of seed and soil microbiota coalescence is therefore strongly asymmetrical with a dominance of soil taxa. Interestingly, seedling microbiota was primarily composed of initially rare taxa (from seed, soil or unknown origin) and sub-dominant soil taxa. Our results suggest that plant microbiome engineering success based on native seed or soil microbiota will rely on rare and sub-dominant taxa in source communities.