Individual leaf microbiota tunes a genetic regulatory network to promote leaf growth

To understand the role of the microbiota in the control of leaf growth in maize, we identified groups of bacterial isolates with certain level of leaf specificity, that we classified as leaf markers. Next, for the leaf markers, four drop-out synthetic communities were built: i) leaf 1 and leaf 2 markers were excluded from the full synthetic community; ii) leaf 3; iii) leaf 4 and iv) leaf 5 markers were excluded from the full synthetic community. To identify the full synthetic community stability due to the sequential removal of leaf marker bacteria, we profiled the bacterial communities established in B73 individual leaves using DNA amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene.