Priority effects and keystone strains shape the Arabidopsis phyllosphere
The plant microbiota establishes similarly year after year, but the assembly principles are poorly understood. The Vorholt group shed light on how arrival order and single strains affected bacterial community structure in the phyllosphere. The paper is published in "Nature Ecology & Evolution."
Drop-out and late introduction experiments were carried out using a gnotobiotic system composed of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and 62 native, genome-sequenced bacterial strains. By altering the arrival order of various bacterial classes and tracking their abundance, Carlström et al. showed that community assembly in the plant phyllosphere is historically contingent and subject to priority effects. Interestingly, although the founding community remained unaltered by newcomers, late arrival could be harmful or beneficial to different late-arriving strains. Additionally, by removing one strain at a time from the mixture of 62 strains, they were able to identify keystone strains that play a large role in shaping community structure in the phyllosphere.
Link to the publication in external page Nature Ecology & Evolution.