Topic modeling of soil microbiomes in droughted corn

Abstract:
Plant-microbiome optimization is a potential solution to improve plant stress tolerance under water shortages. Using early data from a directed evolution experiment, our goal is to find beneficial microbiome compositions in the soil and other environmental factors affecting plant drought tolerance. In this work, we uncover the microbiome communities associated with drought using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation method with Gibbs sampling. We reveal drought-enriched microbiome at the phylum and class taxonomic levels that potentially can help iteratively guide the microbiome development process.