Fig. 5. Drought responses of sorghum mycobiome.

a Pre-flowering drought effect on OTU abundance and fungal community composition. Note the strongest effects (R²) on root and rhizosphere. b Post-flowering drought effect on OTU abundance and fungal community composition. Note strong effects (R²) on all compartments except soil. OTUs above a false discovery threshold [green horizontal line with P < 0.00005 (≈0.05/1070 OTUs) or −log (P) = 10] show significant bias between drought and control. The symbol size corresponds to OTU abundance (log transformed) and color corresponds to fungus functional guild. Genera of the significant OTUs can be found at Supplementary Fig. 28. The R² is the difference in fungal community composition between control and drought treatments, as determined by permutational analysis of variance (PERM ANOVA). c Plant pathogenic fungal OTUs significantly affected by drought. In the compartments showing the strongest drought effects, root and rhizosphere, under post-flowering drought, plant pathogenic fungal OTUs become significantly more abundant than control, but under pre-flowering drought the pathogens are never more abundant than controls. d Boxplot showing OTU richness of fungal communities was significantly affected by drought in rhizosphere and roots. Note decreased richness under pre- but not under post-flowering drought in the rhizosphere and, oppositely, decreased fungal richness under post- but not pre-flowering drought in roots. e Delay of fungal community development by drought. Random Forest modeling of fungal community age shows that both pre- and post-flowering drought delayed the development of fungal communities to a similar extent. Random Forest modeling was used because pre- and post-flowering droughts are inherently temporal partitioned (Fig. 3), making it improper to simply compare the temporally variable, community compositional variance. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.