A major trade-off between growth and defense in Arabidopsis thaliana can vanish in field conditions
Fig 4
ACD6-Est-1 has negligible effects on colonization by a natural microbiome.
(A) Heatmap showing square root transformed relative abundances of bacterial families (rows, unlabeled) based on classification of V4 16S rDNA bacterial reads from both planted A. thaliana individuals and plant samples from wild populations (columns in heatmap). Samples in the heatmap are clustered by Bray–Curtis dissimilarity, with groupings shown in the dendrogram. The environment of cultivation is indicated by a horizontal color key (vertically staggered only to improve visibility) between the dendrogram and heatmap, using colors in the “environment legend.” The genotype of the plants is similarly shown using colors in the “genotype legend.” For the environment legend, Gh-Tü = greenhouse Tübingen; F-Tü = field Tübingen; F-Z = field Zurich; W-Tü = wild Tübingen (natural populations near Tübingen). (B) Same as A, but showing fungal families based on ITS2 amplicons. (C) Bacterial load, i: for Tübingen-grown plants from 2017 as calculated by the ratio of bacterial reads to plant reads in metagenome data. ii: for Zurich-grown plants from 2019 as deduced from hamPCR. Environment and genotype colors follow the same code as in A. Boxes enclose the interquartile range (IQR) with whiskers extending to up to 1.5 times the IQR. (D) Bacterial loads of the most abundant ASVs in growth chamber-grown plants infected with Pst DC3000 and a mix of uncharacterized phyllosphere microbes. *P < 0.05 in a Mann–Whitney U-test with Benjamini–Hochberg correction for multiple testing of each of the eight ASVs. The ASV corresponding to Pst DC3000 is labeled in red. The data underlying this figure can be found in https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15527338.