Functional capacities drive recruitment of bacteria into plant root microbiota.
Functional diversity, rather than taxonomy, drives bacterial recruitment into plant root microbiomes across different hosts and environments.
- Why it matters: Understanding how plants select their root microbiota is crucial for predicting and engineering beneficial plant-microbe interactions, yet the underlying principles remain unclear.
- What they did: The study used reconstitution experiments with bacterial isolates from Arabidopsis, barley, and Lotus, analyzing 266 functions enriched across microbiomes to identify core functional signatures.
- The result: A core set of functions was identified as a universal signature of plant-associated bacteria, enabling targeted microbiome engineering to improve agricultural outcomes.