Climatic zone and soil properties determine the biodiversity of the soil bacterial communities associated to native plants from desert areas of north-central algeria

Algeria is the largest country in Africa, characterised by semi-arid and arid sites in the north and hypersaline areas in the centre and south of the country. Several native plants are known as medicinal plants, having in common tolerance to aridity, drought and salinity. In their natural environment, they coexist with a large number of microbial species that are collectively referred to as the plant microbiota. In this work, the soil microbiota associated with the roots of fourteen indigenous plants of economic importance from Algeria was characterised by means of an innovative metagenomic approach with a twofold aim: (i) to deepen our knowledge of the arid and semi-arid environment and (ii) to characterise the composition of the bacterial communities associated with indigenous plants of strong economic/commercial interest, in order to make it possible to improve their cultivation. The raw genomic characterisation data of the microbial communities present are available on the publicly accessible NCBI database. The results presented in this work showed specific signatures that are mainly determined by the climatic zone and soil properties rather than the plant species. The results obtained in this work will make it possible to better manage the cultivation of plants of economic interest using arid soils that otherwise could not be used.