🌾 Take-home message:
Seedling colonization is shaped not only by microbial traits but also by microbial interactions, a key insight for engineering seed and seedling microbiomes.

🧬 Genomic analyses highlight traits linked to efficient seedling colonization:
✔️ amino acid transport and metabolism
✔️ stress tolerance
✔️ ROS detoxification
✔️ biofilm formation

🤖 RF model shows that strain ID is the most important feature, suggesting that testing strains across multiple community contexts helps reveal their competitive potential.

📊 Two major predictors also emerge: Phylogenetic and metabolic relatedness, supporting the competition–relatedness hypothesis.

🔍 Key result:
👉 Colonization success is strongly modulated by community context and cannot be predicted from single-strain performance alone, showing that microbial interactions are crucial.

🧪 We used a Synthetic Community (SynCom) approach on common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), testing 30 bacterial communities spanning a phylogenetic diversity gradient.

🌱 The seed-to-seedling transition is a key step where seed microbiota meets soil microbiota.
It’s a phase of strong microbial selection (exudates, oxidative stress, etc.).