Data from: The impact of bacteriophages on phyllosphere bacterial abundance and composition

Interactions between bacteria and bacteriophage viruses (phages) are known
to influence pathogen growth and virulence, microbial diversity, and even
biogeochemical cycling. Lytic phages in particular infect and lyse their
host cells, and can therefore have significant effects on cell densities
as well as competitive dynamics within microbial communities. Despite the
known impacts of lytic phages on the ecology and evolution of bacteria in
free-living communities, little is known about the role of lytic phages in
host-associated microbiomes. We set out to characterize the impact of
phages in the tomato phyllosphere, i.e., the bacteria associated with
above-ground plant tissues, by transferring microbial communities from
field-grown tomato plants to juvenile plants grown under mostly sterile
conditions in either the presence or absence of their associated phage
community. In three separate experiments, we found that the presence of
phages affects overall bacterial abundance during colonization of new host
plants. Furthermore, bacterial community analysis using 16S rRNA amplicon
sequencing shows that phages significantly alter the relative abundance of
dominant community members and can influence both within- and among-host
diversity. These results underscore the importance of lytic phages in
host-associated microbiomes and are relevant to microbiome transplantation
approaches, as they suggest transferring non-bacterial components of the
microbiome among hosts is likely to have a strong impact on growth of both
the resident and donor microbiota.