Fig. 5. Invasion and persistence of commensal bacteria.
a, Setup of the sequential inoculation experiment. Lj Gifu and At Col-0 plants were cocultivated with the mixed community LjAt-SC3, or individual SynComs Lj-SC3 and At-SC3, followed by inoculation with the contrasting SynCom (exp. L). b,c, Constrained PCoA (CPCoA) of Bray–Curtis dissimilarities (constrained by all biological factors and conditioned by all technical variables; n = 267; variance explained 14.7%, P = 0.001) of soil, rhizosphere and root samples (b), and PCoA of root samples only (n = 137, c). d,e, Aggregated RA of the 16 Lj-derived and the 16 At-derived strains in Lotus and Arabidopsis root (d) (n = 120) and rhizosphere (e) (n = 120) samples in the indicated treatments. Different letters above boxes indicate different significance groups according to a Kruscal–Wallis test, followed by a Dunn’s post hoc.