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Distinctive Phyllosphere Bacterial Communities in Tropical Trees

  • Plant Microbe Interactions
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Abstract

Recent work has suggested that in temperate and subtropical trees, leaf surface bacterial communities are distinctive to each individual tree species and dominated by Alpha- and Gammaproteobacteria. In order to understand how general this pattern is, we studied the phyllosphere bacterial community on leaves of six species of tropical trees at a rainforest arboretum in Malaysia. This represents the first detailed study of ‘true’ tropical lowland tree phyllosphere communities. Leaf surface DNA was extracted and pyrosequenced targeting the V1–V3 region of 16S rRNA gene. As was previously found in temperate and subtropical trees, each tree species had a distinctive bacterial community on its leaves, clustering separately from other tree species in an ordination analysis. Bacterial communities in the phyllosphere were unique to plant leaves in that very few operational taxonomic units (0.5%) co-occurred in the surrounding soil environment. A novel and distinctive aspect of tropical phyllosphere communities is that Acidobacteria were one of the most abundant phyla across all samples (on average, 17%), a pattern not previously recognized. Sequences belonging to Acidobacteria were classified into subgroups 1–6 among known 24 subdivisions, and subgroup 1 (84%) was the most abundant group, followed by subgroup 3 (15%). The high abundance of Acidobacteria on leaves of tropical trees indicates that there is a strong relationship between host plants and Acidobacteria in tropical rain forest, which needs to be investigated further. The similarity of phyllosphere bacterial communities amongst the tree species sampled shows a significant tendency to follow host plant phylogeny, with more similar communities on more closely related hosts.

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Acknowledgements

This work was in part funded by a Malaysian government ‘Brain Gain Fellowship’ granted to Jonathan Adams December 2008 to August 2010. We thank Y-M. Oh and B. Tripathi of SNU for their help with sample processing.

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Correspondence to Jonathan M. Adams.

Electronic Supplementary Materials

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Table S1

Sequencing results with diversity measures (DOC 75 kb)

Table S2

Taxonomic affiliation of the 29 most abundant OTUs across all tree species with sequences in GenBank (DOC 45 kb)

Figure S1

Taxonomic composition of phyllospehre bacterial phyla (JPG 3.91 MB)

High resolution image file (EPS 1.58 MB)

Figure S2

Relative abundance of dominant Acidobacterial OTUs between different tree species. Taxonomic affiliation of each OTU was shown in parenthesis (1, subgroup 1; 3, subgroup 3) (DOC 159 kb)

Figure S3

Clustering patterns of phyllosphere bacterial communities between tree species in phylum level. Principal coordinates plots (PCoA) were generated using pairwise unweighted Unifrac distances between samples. Four dominant bacterial phyla are shown as a Acidobacteria, b Alphaproteobacteria, c Bacteroidetes, and d Actinobacteria, respectively (DOC 281 kb)

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Kim, M., Singh, D., Lai-Hoe, A. et al. Distinctive Phyllosphere Bacterial Communities in Tropical Trees. Microb Ecol 63, 674–681 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-011-9953-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-011-9953-1

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