Microbial responses to stress cryptically alter natural selection on plants

Microbial communities can rapidly respond to stress, meaning plants may encounter altered soil microbial communities in stressful environments. Stress may therefore affect plant natural selection not only directly, but also indirectly via changes to the microbial community. Because stress can cause lasting changes to microbial communities, microbes may also cause legacy effects on plant selection that persist even after the stress ceases.
To explore microbial indirect and legacy effects, we grew plants in stressful (salt, herbicide, or herbivory) or non-stressful conditions with microbes that had experienced each of these environments in the previous generation.
Microbial indirect effects generally counteracted the direct effects of stress on plant selection, thereby weakening the strength of stress as a selective agent. Microbial legacy effects altered plant selection in non-stressful environments, suggesting that stress-induced changes to microbes may continue to affect selection afte..., , , # Microbial responses to stress cryptically alter natural selection on plants

For publication in New Phytologist (2024)

Please contact Lana Bolin ([[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])) with any questions
related to this data repository.
The authors ask that they be contacted before publishing work using the following datasets.
When using the following dataset please cite the original paper as well as the data repository.

This repository contains 1 data file.

Please see the methods section of Bolin and Lau (submitted for review at New Phytologist, 2023) for more details on how the following data were collected and analyzed.Files contained within this repository:

1. Bolin_Lau_NewPhyt_data.csv
This data file contains plant survival, biomass, flowering time,and specific leaf area measurements.

##Variables
Pot.num: Unique identifier for each plant.
Flowering.date: Date when the first flower as fully open. Empty cell = plant did not flower.
ShootBioma...