Fig. 3. Heritability of rhizosphere microbes is conserved across maize and sorghum.
A Proportional Venn diagram of bacterial orders containing highly heritable OTUs identified in this study (Sorghum SAP), compared with the heritable orders reported in a large-scale field study of maize nested association mapping (NAM) parental lines grown over two separate years, published in Walters et al. [5]. The top 100 heritable OTUs (based on H2) from each dataset were classified at the taxonomic rank of order to generate the Venn diagram. NAM highly heritable orders only present in the SAP lowly heritable fraction are represented by the blue sections. Superscript letters indicate the frequency that a random subsampling of 100 sorghum OTUs from the total 1189 sorghum OTUs (10,000 permutations) produced greater order-level overlap with maize OTUs from either single year (a/b) or both (c). B Stacked barplot displaying cumulative counts (y-axis) of OTUs identified as highly heritable in any of the three datasets for all bacterial orders (x-axis) which have a total of at least three highly heritable OTUs in an order. C The fraction of highly heritable sorghum OTUs relative to all sorghum OTUs within each order is displayed as a heatmap. Asterisks indicate orders enriched in highly heritable OTUs (Fisher’s exact test, q < 0.05).