1 Root development is maintained by specific bacteria-bacteria interactions within a complex microbiome Authors: Omri M. Finkel 1,2† , Isai Salas-González 1,2,3† , Gabriel Castrillo 1,2†‡ , Theresa F. Law 1,2 , Jonathan M. Conway 1,2 , Paulo José Pereira Lima Teixeira 1,2¤ , Corbin D. Jones 1,3,4,5,6,7 , Jeffery L. Dangl 1,2,3,6,7,8* Affiliations: 1 Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. 2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. 3 Curriculum in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. 4 Department of Genetics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. 5 Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. 6 Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. 7 Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. 8 Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America. *Correspondence to: dangl@email.unc.edu †These authors contributed equally to this work. ‡Current address: Future Food Beacon of Excellence and the School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, United Kingdom ¤Current address: Department of Biology, “Luiz de Queiroz” College of Agriculture (ESALQ), University of São Paulo (USP), Piracicaba, São Paulo, Brazil . CC-BY 4.0 International license certified by peer review) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not this version posted June 4, 2019. . https://doi.org/10.1101/645655 doi: bioRxiv preprint