“…Previous studies have analyzed bacterial taxa associated with maize. Most of the work has been done by using culture-dependent methods (Rai et al, 2007 ; Rijavec et al, 2007 ; Pereira et al, 2009 , 2011 ; Ikeda et al, 2013 ; Celador-Lera et al, 2016 ; Menéndez et al, 2016 ; Sandhya et al, 2017 ) or assessed bacterial diversity independently of culture approaches (Schmalenberger and Tebbe, 2003 ; Herschkovitz et al, 2005a , b ; Pereira et al, 2011 ; Correa-Galeote et al, 2016 ; Liu et al, 2017 ). The high-throughput pyrosequencing technology introduced by 454 Life Science (Margulies et al, 2005 ; Rothberg and Leamon, 2008 ) has been used to assess diversity in cultivar-specific bacterial endophyte communities in potato roots (Manter et al, 2010 ), leaf vegetables (Jackson et al, 2013 ), the spermosphere and phyllosphere of spinach (López-Velasco et al, 2013 ), tomato leaves (Romero et al, 2014 ), grapevine leaves and stems (Yousaf et al, 2014 ) and roots and shoots of cucumber (Eevers et al, 2016 ).…”