Interacting beneficial and detrimental responses to drought in the sorghum microbiome

As a transitional system, we tested the synthetic communities from Arabidopsis through a 24-day high-throughput sorghum phenotyping assay and found that during drought stress, plants colonized by Arthrobacter were significantly smaller and had reduced leaf water content as compared to control plants. However, plants colonized by both Arthrobacter and Variovorax performed as well or better than control plants.