New Nature Ecology & Evolution Paper by the Vorholt lab
Synthetic microbiota reveal priority effects and keystone strains in the Arabidopsis phyllosphere.
Charlotte I. Carlström, Christopher M. Field, Miriam Bortfeld-Miller, Barbara Müller, Shinichi Sunagawa and Julia A. Vorholt
Nature Ecology & Evolution, Oct 2019, doi: 10.1038/s41559-019-0994-z
Multicellular organisms, including plants, are colonized by microorganisms, some of which are beneficial to growth and health.
The assembly rules for establishing plant microbiota are not well understood, and neither is the extent to which their members
interact. We conducted drop-out and late introduction experiments by inoculating Arabidopsis thaliana with synthetic com-
munities from a resource of 62 native bacterial strains to test how arrival order shapes community structure. As a read-out
we tracked the relative abundance of all strains in the phyllosphere of individual plants. Our results showed that community
assembly is historically contingent and subject to priority effects. Missing strains could, to various degrees, invade an already
established microbiota, which was itself resistant and remained largely unaffected by latecomers. Additionally, our results indi-
cate that individual strains of Proteobacteria (Sphingomonas, Rhizobium) and Actinobacteria (Microbacterium, Rhodococcus)
have the greatest potential to affect community structure as keystone species.
external page Link to the published paper