Back

Leaf bacterial community structure and variation in wild ruderal plants are shaped by the interaction of host species and defense chemistry with environment

Mayer, T.; Reichelt, M.; Gershenzon, J.; Agler, M. T.

2022-03-16 ecology
10.1101/2022.03.16.484556 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Variable phenotypes help plants ensure fitness and survival in the face of unpredictable environmental stresses. Leaf bacteria (bacteriomes) can extend plant phenotypes and are well-known to vary from one plant to the next, but little is known about controls on this variation. Here, we find in 9 populations of Arabidopsis thaliana that core leaf bacteriomes are largely, but not completely, shared with other ground-dwelling ruderal plant species. Strength of differentiation between plant species and between A. thaliana populations shifts from year to year, becoming stronger when plants within populations have more similar leaf bacteriomes (less plant-to-plant variation or stochasticity). Interestingly, across different populations, plants with shared leaf aliphatic glucosinolate chemotypes exhibited similar strong year-to-year stochasticity shifts. Therefore, stochasticity of leaf bacteriomes in plant populations changes in specific ways and might be controlled by plant traits, with important implications for how plants adapt to complex and shifting environments.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.