Fig 1.
The influence of salinity treatment on Caliph medic seedlings.
Table 1.
Physicochemical properties of the soil used to grow Caliph medic seeds.
Table 2.
Bacterial OTUs identified from Caliph medic roots based on 16S rRNA DNA sequences and the mean of abundance in the libraries prepared from the control and salinity-treated plants.
Significant enrichment (p ≤ 0.05) of a certain OTU was calculated based on three biological replicates. The OTUs were arranged based on the descending p-value.
Fig 2.
Relative abundance of different class (A) and genus (B) in each replica of the control (C1-3) and NaCl treated (T1-3) samples. The abundance is expressed as the percentage in the total number of reads per each OTU.
Fig 3.
A neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree that was constructed based on the 16S rRNA DNA sequences, showing the relationships between the bacterial taxa identified in this study.
The bootstrap values >50% (based on 1,000 replications) are shown at branching points. Differential abundance OTUs (p ≤ 0.05) in the salinity-treated and control roots are indicated by closed red and green circles, respectively.
Table 3.
Changes in the community richness and biodiversity indices among the six 16S rRNA libraries in response to NaCl treatment in Caliph medic.
Significant changes based on p ≤ 0.05, n = 3, which were calculated using the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test, are indicated by an asterisk.
Fig 4.
A heat map of the hierarchical cluster analysis and a dendrogram showing the normalized relative abundance of 41 identified species from three bacterial communities, which were prepared from roots grown under normal conditions (C1-3) and from three bacterial communities prepared from roots grown under NaCl stress (T1-3).
Fig 5.
Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) illustrating distances between bacterial communities identified from control (C1-C3) and NaCl-treated roots (T1-T3) of Caliph medic.
The pairwise comparison using the ANOSIM test did not show significant variation (p = 0.0964) between the community groups identified from control plants (Cont) and NaCl plants (Trt). The first two coordinates explained about 96% while the third coordinate explained only 2.3% of the variation.