Covariation of Soil Bacterial Composition with Plant Rarity

Abstract

Rare and common plants are predicted to host different rhizospheric microbes. To evaluate this prediction, we used terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis to compare rhizospheric bacteria from eight native grass species whose local abundances in their natural ecosystem spanned a 15-fold range. We observed that locally rare versus common plants are associated with divergent bacterial communities.