Fig. 2

Community structure of protistan taxonomic and functional groups explaining differences between diseased and healthy plants at plant establishment (week 0) (a). Community structure of phagotrophic protists (b) and indicator protistan OTUs (c) in diseased and healthy plants at plant establishment, and networks of the functional groups of protistan OTUs directly associated with the R. solanacearum pathogen in healthy and diseased plants at plant establishment (d). Correlations between the relative abundance of phagotrophic protists and R. solanacearum in diseased and healthy plants across plant growth (e). In panel a, only abundant taxonomic and functional groups of protists were selected (average relative abundance over 1%). In panel a and b, asterisk means P < 0.05. In panel c, protistan OTUs with LDA score > 2.0 are indicators for healthy plants, while protistan OTUs with LDA score < − 2.0 are belonging to diseased plants. In panel d, blue lines indicate positive, and red lines indicate negative correlations. In panel e, the solid line shows a significant (P < 0.05) correlation, and the dashed line shows a non-significant (P > 0.05) correlation