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Title: pHeeling Better: Coumarins and a Targeted Microbiome Work Together to Promote Plant Health in Alkaline Conditions

Abstract: Alkaline conditions can be a devastating stressor for crops, limiting essential nutrients and diminishing growth and yield. Climate change is predicted to increase soil alkalinity in many regions worldwide, making it crucial to develop new strategies to promote plant resilience. The plant microbiome can provide a multitude of benefits under pH stress, and creating targeted communities of beneficial microbes is a promising method for improving plant health. Plants play an active role in shaping their microbiomes by producing metabolites such as coumarins, but the extent to which coumarins and the microbiome work together to enhance plant health is unknown. To investigate these interactions, we screened bacterial isolates for beneficial traits and constructed a 35-member community. We applied this community to wildtype and coumarin-deficient lines of the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, under optimal pH and alkaline pH conditions. We find that coumarin production and the beneficial microbiome together are necessary for optimizing health and resilience in alkaline conditions. These findings provide key insights into the complex interactions among pH stress, plant-produced coumarins, and the microbiome which can be used to inform the design of future beneficial communities.