For colonization success, should hosts and microbes travel alone, together, or swap partners along the way?
Usui T, Yu J, Frederickson ME
Soil Health
Native plant restorations often fail quietly in the first few seasons — and this research suggests one overlooked reason is that transplants arrive carrying a microbial community tuned to somewhere else, not to the soil where you're trying to establish them.
Plants don't travel alone — they carry an invisible community of bacteria and other tiny organisms that live in and around them. When scientists moved duckweed into new ponds, plants that brought their hometown microbes with them struggled more than plants that picked up the local microbial community instead. Strangely, even after the old microbes were replaced by new ones, the plants still felt the effects of that bad start for several generations.
Key Findings
Plants co-introduced with non-local (home-habitat) microbes showed substantially reduced performance compared to plants paired with microbes native to the new habitat
The performance penalty from a mismatched initial microbiome persisted across multiple host generations, even after microbial community composition had rapidly turned over
Microbiome identity at the moment of introduction — not just microbiome composition at steady state — is a critical but overlooked predictor of colonization success
chevron_right Technical Summary
When plants colonize new habitats, the microbes they bring from home can undermine their establishment compared to plants that acquire local microbes. A duckweed field experiment shows these microbial mismatches cause lasting performance penalties that outlast the microbes themselves.
Abstract Preview
Microbiomes that enhance the performance of host plants are likely to be co-introduced with their host during colonization because of their intimate association. Yet, it is unclear how co-introduce...
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Lemnoideae is a subfamily of flowering aquatic plants, known as duckweeds, water lentils, or water lenses. They float on or just beneath the surface of still or slow-moving bodies of fresh water and wetlands. Also known as bayroot, they arose from within the arum or aroid family (Araceae), so oft...