Fungal community composition links rhizosphere microbiome organization to plant phenotype in response to moderate warming
BackgroundGlobal warming increasingly challenges plant performance and ecosystem function, and plant responses to elevated temperature are shaped not only by intrinsic plasticity, but also by interactions with rhizosphere microbial communities. However, it remains unclear how warming-induced microbiome reorganization relates to plant performance, whether microbiome community composition predicts plant phenotypic responses to elevated temperature better than simple host-microbiome origin matching, and which bacterial or fungal community features contribute most strongly to this prediction. ResultsWe implemented a full factorial design manipulating plant genotype (P), microbial inoculum (M), and temperature (T) using natural Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes and their corresponding rhizosphere microbiomes from contrasting climatic regions. By integrating high-throughput plant phenotyping, microbial community profiling, microbiome-phenotype coupling analyses, and predictive modeling, we found that elevated temperature induced a coherent thermomorphogenic shift in plant architecture, while plant phenotypic variation remained determined primarily by genotype over the 14-day vegetative growth period covered in this study. Overall, cold-origin genotypes showed larger temperature-induced trait shifts than warm-origin genotypes. Rhizosphere microbial communities were structured predominantly by inoculum origin, but were also affected by warming. Evidence for a increased thermomorphogenic growth when genotypes were combined with inoculum from their home site was limited. Instead, microbiome-phenotype associations were better captured by community composition than by matching status, with fungal community variation showing stronger and more consistent associations with plant phenotype than bacterial variation and providing more robust predictions of plant phenotypes across models. ConclusionsWarming reorganized plant-rhizosphere systems within persistent host- and inoculum-associated baselines. Plant phenotypic variation during vegetative development under elevated temperature was linked more closely to microbiome composition, especially in fungi, than to simple host-microbiome matching of origins. These findings provide a framework for identifying microbiome features associated with plant performance under climate warming.