Metatranscriptomic response of the wheat holobiont to decreasing soil water content

It is admitted that multicellular hosts and their microbiota form an indissociable unit, the holobiont. Even though it is posited that this unit would react in a coordinated fashion to environmental stress, the role of each of the partners is ill-defined. Here, we subjected wheat to a gradient of water availability in the field using rainout shelters that let through 100%, 75%, 50% and 25% of the precipitation. At the height of the growing season, we sampled plant roots and rhizosphere, and extracted and sequenced their RNA. Taken together, our results are showing that the response of the wheat holobiont to decreasing precipitation levels is mostly carried out by fungi and bacteria, with very little response from the plant itself.