Abstract
Plants harbor varied communities of bacterial endophytes which play a crucial role in plant health and growth. Dicoma anomala is a medicinal plant that is known for its excellent ethnomedicinal uses which include treatment of coughs, fever, ulcers, and dysentery. This data in Brief article provides information on the diversity of bacterial endophytes associated with a medicinal plant, Dicoma anomala targeting the 16S rRNA gene using Illumina sequencing technology during three different seasons. Plant samples were collected in Eisleben, Limpopo province, South Africa, in the months of April, June, August and October 2018. The dataset revealed that the leaf samples collected in August had the highest species diversity as indicated by the Shannon index (4.25), Chao1 (1456.01), abundance-based coverage estimator (ACE) (1492.07) and the Simpson indices of diversity (0.05) irrespective of the species. The order of the bacterial endophyte's richness in D. anomala was April> October> June> August, from lowest to highest. The taxonomic composition analysis showed that most endophytic bacteria were composed of Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes and Chloroflexi. Some endophytic bacteria were found to be tissue specific. Sequences of Cutibacterium, Acinetobacter and Methylobacterium were prevalent in the leaves, whereas Amycolatopsis and Bradyrhizobium were the dominant genera in the root samples.