A latitudinal pattern of plant leaf-associated bacterial community assembly

Plant-associated microbes are essential for promoting plant well-being, maintaining biodiversity, and supporting ecosystem function. However, little is known about the geographic distribution of plant-microbe symbioses and how they are formed and change along latitudinal gradients. Here we identified leaf bacteria for 328 plant species sampled from 10 forests along a tropical to temperate gradient in China. We analyzed the diversity and composition of plant leaf-associated bacteria and quantified the contributions of hosts, habitats, and neighborhood plants to the plant-bacterial symbiosis. We found a strong latitudinal gradient in leaf bacterial diversity and composition. Bacterial assemblages on leaves were most strongly selected by host plants, and the selection pressure increased with latitude. In contrast, at low latitudes and at large geographical scales multiple factors were found to jointly regulate bacterial community composition. Our result also showed that plant-bacteria symbiotic networks were structured by network hub bacteria taxa with high co-occurrence network centrality, and the abundance of temperate hub taxa was more influenced by host plants than that in tropical forests. For the first time, we documented a previously unrecognized latitudinal gradient in plant-bacterial symbioses that was regulated by a joint effect of multiple factors at low latitudes but mostly by host selection at high latitudes, implying that leaf microbiomes are likely to respond differently to global change along the latitudinal gradient.