Impact of Inoculation Practices on Microbiota Assembly and Community Stability in a Fabricated Ecosystem

Studying plant–microbe–soil interactions is challenging due to their high complexity and variability in natural ecosystems. While fabricated ecosystems provide opportunities to recapitulate aspects of these systems in reduced complexity and controlled environments, inoculation can be a significant source of variation. To tackle this, we evaluated how different bacterial inoculation practices and plant harvesting time points affect the reproducibility of a synthetic microbial community (SynCom) in association with the model grass Brachypodium distachyon. We tested three microbial inoculation practices, seed inoculation, transplant inoculation, and seedling inoculation, and two harvesting points, early (14-day-old plants) and late (21 days postinoculation). We grew our plants and bacterial strains in sterile devices (EcoFABs) and characterized the microbial community from root, rhizosphere, and sand using 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing. The results showed that inoculation practices significantly affected the rhizosphere microbial community when harvesting at an early time point but not at the late time point. As the SynCom showed a persistent association with B. distachyon at 21 days postinoculation regardless of inoculation practices, we assessed the reproducibility of each inoculation method and found that transplant inoculation showed the highest reproducibility. Moreover, plant biomass was not adversely affected by transplant inoculation treatment. We concluded that bacterial inoculation while transplanting coupled with a later harvesting time point gives the most reproducible microbial community in the EcoFAB−B. distachyon−SynCom fabricated ecosystem. We recommend this method as a standardized protocol for use with fabricated ecosystem experimental systems. [Graphic: see text] This manuscript has been authored by an author at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under Contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges, that the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.