Plants associate with diverse microbial communities that influence growth and health. Although the plant immune regulatory network balances defense activation and microbial accommodation during pathogen attack, how it coordinates beneficial plant-microbe interactions across complex microbial contexts remains unclear. Here, we performed a systematic screen of 39 immune-pathway mutants using individual plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPBs), binary combinations, synthetic and natural communities. We identified the bik1-1 mutant as exhibiting a broad defect in growth promotion across multiple beneficial microbial systems. Extensive genetic analyses using independent BIK1 CRISPR and T-DNA insertion alleles, as well as overexpression lines, demonstrated that the growth promotion defect observed in the bik1-1 line is not caused by loss of BIK1 function but instead correlates with a chromosomal fragment duplication. Although ISR and beneficial bacteria-mediated pathogen protection remain intact in bik1-1, immune activation is elevated during beneficial interactions. Microbiome profiling revealed reduced diversity and altered community structure, and microbiome transfer experiments indicate that host immune status influences the selection of microbial taxa associated with growth promotion. These findings indicate that immune signaling balance is a key determinant of plant-microbiome compatibility across diverse microbial contexts.
Han et al. (Fri,) studied this question.