Phytobiomes are compositionally nested from the ground up
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Microbiology, Plant Science
- Keywords
- Phytobiomes, Nestedness, Isolation by Distance, 16S, Plant Microbiome
- Copyright
- © 2018 Amend et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Phytobiomes are compositionally nested from the ground up. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27393v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27393v1
Abstract
Plant-associated microbes are critical players in host health, fitness and productivity. Despite microbes’ importance in plants, seeds are mostly sterile, and most plant microbes are recruited from an environmental pool. Surprisingly little is known about the processes that govern how environmental microbes assemble on plants in nature. In this study we examine how bacteria are distributed across plant parts, and how these distributions interact with spatial gradients. We sequenced amplicons of bacteria from six plant parts and adjacent soil of Scaevola taccada, a common beach shrub, along a 60 km transect spanning Oʻahu island’s windward coast, as well as within a single intensively-sampled site. Bacteria are more strongly partitioned by plant part as compared with location. Within S. taccada plants, microbial communities are highly nested: soil and rhizosphere communities contain much of the diversity found elsewhere, whereas reproductive parts fall at the bottom of the nestedness hierarchy. Nestedness patterns suggest either that microbes follow a source/sink gradient from the ground up, or else that assembly processes correlate with other traits, such as tissue persistence, that are vertically stratified. Our work shines light on the origins and determinants of plant-associated microbes across plant and landscape scales.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Box and whisker plots of dispersion of Jaccard beta diversity values within plant parts and soil samples
No dispersion means significantly differed in pairwise comparisons.