RESEARCH ARTICLE Microbial Hub Taxa Link Host and Abiotic Factors to Plant Microbiome Variation Matthew T. Agler1, Jonas Ruhe1, Samuel Kroll1, Constanze Morhenn1, Sang-Tae Kim2, Detlef Weigel3, Eric M. Kemen1* 1 Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany, 2 Center for Genome Engineering, Institute for Basic Science, Daejeon, South Korea, 3 Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany *
[email protected] Abstract Plant-associated microorganisms have been shown to critically affect host physiology and performance, suggesting that evolution and ecology of plants and animals can only be OPEN ACCESS understood in a holobiont (host and its associated organisms) context. Host-associated microbial community structures are affected by abiotic and host factors, and increased Citation: Agler MT, Ruhe J, Kroll S, Morhenn C, Kim attention is given to the role of the microbiome in interactions such as pathogen inhibition. S-T, Weigel D, et al. (2016) Microbial Hub Taxa Link Host and Abiotic Factors to Plant Microbiome However, little is known about how these factors act on the microbial community, and espe- Variation. PLoS Biol 14(1): e1002352. doi:10.1371/ cially what role microbe–microbe interaction dynamics play. We have begun to address this journal.pbio.1002352 knowledge gap for phyllosphere microbiomes of plants by simultaneously studying three Academic Editor: Matthew K. Waldor, Harvard major groups of Arabidopsis thaliana symbionts (bacteria, fungi and oomycetes) using a University, UNITED STATES systems biology approach. We evaluated multiple potential factors of microbial community Received: June 30, 2015 control: we sampled various wild A. thaliana populations at different times, performed field Accepted: December 8, 2015 plantings with different host genotypes, and implemented successive host colonization experiments under lab conditions where abiotic factors, host genotype, and pathogen colo- Published: January 20, 2016 nization was manipulated.