Investigating bacteria interactions in a synthetic phyllosphere community using genomes and in vitro phenotypic assays

A major challenge in harnessing microbiome function is understanding the factors that drive community assembly and composition. Community assembly dynamics and the interspecific microbial interactions all occurring within microbiomes have impacts on the resulting function of the community. Bacteria are major inhabitants of the phyllosphere microbiome and are known to influence their host plant through a variety of mechanisms. Here, we investigated the direct and indirect interaction effects within a synthetic community of tomato-derived bacteria strains using reciprocal growth assays in spent media. The 16s rRNA gene sequencing data here represent the 66 communities that generated each spent media type.