Plant resistance and leaf chemical characteristic jointly shape phyllosphere bacterial community

Phyllosphere bacteria have an important role in plant growth and resistance to pathogen infection and are partially influenced by plant genotype and leaf environment. How plant resistance to pathogens and leaf chemical characteristics shape the phyllosphere bacterial communities is unclear. In this study, the phyllosphere bacterial communities of maize hybrids with various resistance to Setosphaeria turcica were compared using the high-throughput sequencing and large-scale culturing methods. The results showed that Shannon and Simpson indices of phyllosphere bacterial communities were markedly higher in the highly resistant hybrid (HR) compared with the susceptible one. Hierarchical clustering analysis, unweighted UniFrac principal component analysis (PCoA) and the analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) demonstrated that the phyllosphere bacterial communities were significantly distinct between resistant and susceptible hybrids. The redundancy analysis (RDA) demonstrated that leaf chemical characteristics, including nitrogen and phosphorus concentration, and disease resistance play an important role in shaping the phyllosphere bacterial community. Linear discriminant effect size (LEfSe) analysis indicated that Bacillus, Pseudomonas and Tumebacillus were the biomarker species in the phyllosphere of HR. Biocontrol bacteria against S. turcica (such as Pseudomonas and Bacillus) were isolated from the phyllosphere of HR by large-scale culturing. The work contributes to understanding of the phyllosphere bacterial community assembly and provides a new clue to screening for strong biocontrol bacteria from HR and to facilitating future breeding efforts for enhancing disease resistance.