Figure 5. Bacterial communities from field-grown plants showed differences in species richness between the root and the leaf compartments.

(A) Empty vector control (EV) and ICE 8 plants were planted in a paired design at the field plot on the Lytle Ranch Preserve in Utah (USA). Plant pairs showed equal growth and were harvested during the rosette stage of growth (22 dpp). Leaf and root samples were analyzed for the pilot sequencing as pooled samples from five individual plants compared to bulk soil. (B) Alpha diversity measures of the bacterial communities in the pilot sequencing showed an extreme low species richness within the leaf compartment (EV = black, ICE 8 = blue). For subsequent analyses, all samples were rarefied to 800 reads per sample (excluding low coverage leaf samples). (C) Venn diagram showing the shared phylotypes (genus level) of the rarefied communities (areas proportional). (D) Bacterial communities from roots were distinct from leaf and bulk soil as shown by hierarchical clustering by the Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA) and principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) using the weighted and unweighted UniFrac as a distance measure.