Are plant traits drivers of endophytic communities in seasonally flooded tropical forests?
Language
en
Article de revue
This item was published in
American Journal of Botany. 2024-07-16
Botanical Society of America
English Abstract
In the Amazon basin, seasonally flooded (SF) forests offer varying water constraints, providing an excellent way to investigate the role of habitat selection on microbial communities within plants. However, variations in ...Read more >
In the Amazon basin, seasonally flooded (SF) forests offer varying water constraints, providing an excellent way to investigate the role of habitat selection on microbial communities within plants. However, variations in the microbial community among host plants cannot solely be attributed to environmental factors, and how plant traits contribute to microbial assemblages remains an open question. Methods We described leaf‐ and root‐associated microbial communities using ITS2 and 16 S high‐throughput sequencing and investigated the stochastic‐deterministic balance shaping these community assemblies using two null models. Plant ecophysiological functioning was evaluated by focusing on 10 leaf and root traits in 72 seedlings, belonging to seven tropical SF tree species in French Guiana. We then analyzed how root and leaf traits drove the assembly of endophytic communities. Results While both stochastic and deterministic processes governed the endophyte assembly in the leaves and roots, stochasticity prevailed. Discrepancies were found between fungi and bacteria, highlighting that these microorganisms have distinct ecological strategies within plants. Traits, especially leaf traits, host species and spatial predictors better explained diversity than composition, but they were modest predictors overall. Conclusions This study widens our knowledge about tree species in SF forests, a habitat sensitive to climate change, through the combined analyses of their associated microbial communities with functional traits. We emphasize the need to investigate other plant traits to better disentangle the drivers of the relationship between seedlings and their associated microbiomes, ultimately enhancing their adaptive capacities to climate change.Read less <
English Keywords
Determinism
High-through- put sequencing
Leaf
Microbial communities
Root
Stochasticity
Traits
Tropical tree species
Origin
Hal imported