Project description:Microbial communities in the rhizosphere make significant contributions to crop health and nutrient cycling. However, their ability to perform important biogeochemical processes remains uncharacterized. Important functional genes, which characterize the rhizosphere microbial community, were identified to understand metabolic capabilities in the maize rhizosphere using GeoChip 3.0-based functional gene array method. Triplicate samples were taken for both rhizosphere and bulk soil, in which each individual sample was a pool of four plants or soil cores. To determine the abundance of functional genes in the rhizosphere and bulk soils, GeoChip 3.0 was used.
Project description:Microbial communities in the rhizosphere make significant contributions to crop health and nutrient cycling. However, their ability to perform important biogeochemical processes remains uncharacterized. Important functional genes, which characterize the rhizosphere microbial community, were identified to understand metabolic capabilities in the maize rhizosphere using GeoChip 3.0-based functional gene array method. Triplicate samples were taken for both rhizosphere and bulk soil, in which each individual sample was a pool of four plants or soil cores. To determine the abundance of functional genes in the rhizosphere and bulk soils, GeoChip 3.0 was used.
Project description:Understanding the environmental factors that shape microbial communities is crucial, especially in extreme environments, like Antarctica. Two main forces were reported to influence Antarctic soil microbes: birds and plants. Both birds and plants are currently undergoing unprecedented changes in their distribution and abundance due to global warming. However, we need to clearly understand the relationship between plants, birds and soil microorganisms. We therefore collected rhizosphere and bulk soils from six different sampling sites subjected to different levels of bird influence and colonized by Colobanthus quitensis and Deschampsia antarctica in the Admiralty Bay, King George Island, Maritime Antarctic. Microarray and qPCR assays targeting 16S rRNA genes of specific taxa were used to assess microbial community structure, composition and abundance and analyzed with a range of soil physico-chemical parameters. The results indicated significant rhizosphere effects in four out of the six sites, including areas with different levels of bird influence. Acidobacteria were significantly more abundant in soils with little bird influence (low nitrogen) and in bulk soil. In contrast, Actinobacteria were significantly more abundant in the rhizosphere of both plant species. At two of the sampling sites under strong bird influence (penguin colonies), Firmicutes were significantly more abundant in D. antarctica rhizosphere but not in C. quitensis rhizosphere. The Firmicutes were also positively and significantly correlated to the nitrogen concentrations in the soil. We conclude that the microbial communities in Antarctic soils are driven both by bird and plants, and that the effect is taxa-specific.
Project description:Plants and rhizosphere microbes rely closely on each other, with plants supplying carbon to bacteria in root exudates, and bacteria mobilizing soil-bound phosphate for plant nutrition. When the phosphate supply becomes limiting for plant growth, the composition of root exudation changes, affecting rhizosphere microbial communities and microbially-mediated nutrient fluxes. To evaluate how plant phosphate deprivation affects rhizosphere bacteria, Lolium perenne seedlings were root-inoculated with Pseudomonas aeruginosa 7NR, and grown in axenic microcosms under different phosphate regimes (330 uM vs 3-6 uM phosphate). The effect of biological nutrient limitation was examined by DNA microarray studies of rhizobacterial gene expression.
Project description:Microbial communities in the rhizosphere make significant contributions to crop health and nutrient cycling. However, their ability to perform important biogeochemical processes remains uncharacterized. Important functional genes, which characterize the rhizosphere microbial community, were identified to understand metabolic capabilities in the maize rhizosphere using GeoChip 3.0-based functional gene array method.
Project description:Plants in their natural and agricultural environments are continuously exposed to a plethora of diverse microorganisms resulting in microbial colonization of plants in the rhizosphere. This process is believed to be accompanied by an intricate network of ongoing simultaneous interactions. In this study, we compared transcriptional patterns of Arabidopsis thaliana roots and shoots in the presence and absence of whole microbial communities extracted from compost soil. The results show a clear growth promoting effect of Arabidopsis shoots in the presence of soil microbes compared to axenically grown plants under identical conditions. Element analyses showed that iron uptake was facilitated by these mixed microbial communities which also lead to transcriptional downregulation of genes required for iron transport. In addition, soil microbial communities suppressed the expression of marker genes involved in oxidative stress/redox signalling, cell wall modification and plant defense. While most previous studies have focussed on individual plant-microbe interactions, our data suggest that multi-species transcriptional profiling, using simultaneous plant and metatranscriptomics coupled to metagenomics may be required to further increase our understanding of the intricate networks underlying plant-microbe interactions in their diverse environments.
Project description:Plants in their natural and agricultural environments are continuously exposed to a plethora of diverse microorganisms resulting in microbial colonization of plants in the rhizosphere. This process is believed to be accompanied by an intricate network of ongoing simultaneous interactions. In this study, we compared transcriptional patterns of Arabidopsis thaliana roots and shoots in the presence and absence of whole microbial communities extracted from compost soil. The results show a clear growth promoting effect of Arabidopsis shoots in the presence of soil microbes compared to axenically grown plants under identical conditions. Element analyses showed that iron uptake was facilitated by these mixed microbial communities which also lead to transcriptional downregulation of genes required for iron transport. In addition, soil microbial communities suppressed the expression of marker genes involved in oxidative stress/redox signalling, cell wall modification and plant defense. While most previous studies have focussed on individual plant-microbe interactions, our data suggest that multi-species transcriptional profiling, using simultaneous plant and metatranscriptomics coupled to metagenomics may be required to further increase our understanding of the intricate networks underlying plant-microbe interactions in their diverse environments. Four samples were analysed in total. One corresponded to a pooled sample of RNA extracted from root tissues of 60 plants. The other three were biological replicates from shoot tissues, each of which contained 20 plants. Controls were used as reference and corresponded to tissues of plants grown in sterile conditions.
Project description:Functional redundancy in bacterial communities is expected to allow microbial assemblages to survive perturbation by allowing continuity in function despite compositional changes in communities. Recent evidence suggests, however, that microbial communities change both composition and function as a result of disturbance. We present evidence for a third response: resistance. We examined microbial community response to perturbation caused by nutrient enrichment in salt marsh sediments using deep pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA and functional gene microarrays targeting the nirS gene. Composition of the microbial community, as demonstrated by both genes, was unaffected by significant variations in external nutrient supply, despite demonstrable and diverse nutrient–induced changes in many aspects of marsh ecology. The lack of response to external forcing demonstrates a remarkable uncoupling between microbial composition and ecosystem-level biogeochemical processes and suggests that sediment microbial communities are able to resist some forms of perturbation.