Fig. 1: Overview of screening strategy.

The screening and analysis approach consists in (a) an experimental system of A. thaliana as host, a pathogen (Pseudomonas syringae) and a bacterial strain collection; (b) randomly constituted synthetic communities with which the host is inoculated and measurements of the community and host traits of interest; (c) statistical modeling to identify properties of communities which correlate with variation in the trait of interest (e.g., machine learning); (d) validation of models with an independent dataset; and (e) empirical validation of the properties of the communities identified as potentially impacting the host trait, here pathogen colonization.