Project description:Legumes establish nitrogen-fixing symbiosis with beneficial rhizobia. On the other hand, they might be attacked concomitantly by pathogens raising the question of potential trade-off between mutualism and immunity. Here, using a tripartite system involving the model legume Lotus japonicus, its rhizobial symbiont Mesorhizobium loti and the soil-borne pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum we investigated such trade-offs. We found that interaction with M. loti increases plant resistance against the pathogen without impairing mutualism. Genetic and proteomics characterisation indicate that Lotus resistance is mediated by Effector Triggered Immunity and is associated with distinct proteome modifications in roots and nodules. The inoculation of rhizobia, even if they are not mutualist, increases plant resistance. Our results question the concept of interference between efficient defense reactions and mutualistic interactions and is of great interest for agricultural purposes as it not only restricts pathogen colonisation but would also preserve nitrogen fixation and yield.
Project description:12plex_medicago_2013-08 - r108 in symbiosis with rhizobia wt or rhizobia mutant for baca. - Two experiments to compare the transcriptomic response of medicago plants: Agar medium versus Phytagel medium (exp1) and rhizobium WT versus BacA (exp2). - Medicago truncatula ecotype R108 was inoculated with the symbiotic rhizobium Sinorhizobium meliloti strain Sm1021 and with its derivative mutant delta bacA. Nodules were collected 13 days after inoculation, and RNA were prepared for transcriptome analysis, there were three biological independant experiements.
Project description:Certain alpha- and beta-proteobacteria, the rhizobia, are able to infect legume roots, elicit root nodules, and live therein as endosymbiotic, nitrogen-fixing bacteroids. Host recognition and specificity are the results of consecutive programming events in bacteria and host plants in which important signaling molecules, e.g. plant flavonoids and rhizobial lipooligosaccharides, play key roles. Here, we introduce a new aspect of this symbiosis: the adaptive response to hosts. In contrast to host specificity, which determines early steps in bacteria-plant interaction, the adaptation to hosts refers to late events in mature bacteroids where specific genes are transcribed and translated that help the endosymbionts to meet the disparate environmental requirements imposed by the hosts in which they live. This concept was elaborated with Bradyrhizobium japonicum and three different legumes (soybean, cowpea, siratro). We systematically analyzed and compared the transcriptomes as well as the proteomes in bacteroids from root nodules of the three hosts. Transcripts and proteins were thus identified which are induced in only one of the three hosts. We then focused on those determinants that were congruent in the two data sets of host-specific transcripts and proteins, and arrived at 20 for soybean, 7 for siratro, and 4 for cowpea. One conspicuous gene cluster for a predicted ABC-type transporter, differentially expressed in siratro, was deleted. The corresponding mutant had a symbiotic defect on siratro rather than on soybean or cowpea. This result demonstrates the value of the applied approach and corroborates the host-specific adaptation concept. B. japonicum transcriptome was determined for the three different host plants
Project description:Some legume plants can establish a nitrogen-fixing symbiosis with rhizobia. Compatibilty between rhizobia and legumes is determined at species-specific level, but there are variations on the efficiency of the process determined by the capacity of the plant to select specific strains that are better partners in terms of the biological outcome. In this work we used a model system based in the coevolution of two genetic pools of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) with strains of R. etli that establish a more efficient interaction to study the transcriptional changes occurring in roots at an early time of the interaction.
Project description:Certain alpha- and beta-proteobacteria, the rhizobia, are able to infect legume roots, elicit root nodules, and live therein as endosymbiotic, nitrogen-fixing bacteroids. Host recognition and specificity are the results of consecutive programming events in bacteria and host plants in which important signaling molecules, e.g. plant flavonoids and rhizobial lipooligosaccharides, play key roles. Here, we introduce a new aspect of this symbiosis: the adaptive response to hosts. In contrast to host specificity, which determines early steps in bacteria-plant interaction, the adaptation to hosts refers to late events in mature bacteroids where specific genes are transcribed and translated that help the endosymbionts to meet the disparate environmental requirements imposed by the hosts in which they live. This concept was elaborated with Bradyrhizobium japonicum and three different legumes (soybean, cowpea, siratro). We systematically analyzed and compared the transcriptomes as well as the proteomes in bacteroids from root nodules of the three hosts. Transcripts and proteins were thus identified which are induced in only one of the three hosts. We then focused on those determinants that were congruent in the two data sets of host-specific transcripts and proteins, and arrived at 20 for soybean, 7 for siratro, and 4 for cowpea. One conspicuous gene cluster for a predicted ABC-type transporter, differentially expressed in siratro, was deleted. The corresponding mutant had a symbiotic defect on siratro rather than on soybean or cowpea. This result demonstrates the value of the applied approach and corroborates the host-specific adaptation concept.
Project description:Leguminous plants can enter into root nodule symbioses with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria known as rhizobia. An intriguing but still poorly understood property of the symbiosis is its host specificity, which is controlled at multiple levels involving both rhizobial and host genes. It is widely believed that the host specificity is determined by specific recognition of bacterially derived Nod factors by the cognate host receptor(s). Here we describe the positional cloning of two soybean genes Rj2 and Rfg1 that restrict nodulation with specific strains of Bradyrhizobium japonicum and Sinorhizobium fredii, respectively. We show that Rj2 and Rfg1 are allelic genes encoding a member of the Toll-interleukin receptor/nucleotide-binding site/leucine-rich repeat (TIR-NBS-LRR) class of plant resistance (R) proteins. The involvement of host R genes in the control of genotype-specific infection and nodulation reveals a common recognition mechanism underlying symbiotic and pathogenic host-bacteria interactions and suggests the existence of their cognate avirulence genes derived from rhizobia. This study suggests that establishment of a root nodule symbiosis requires the evasion of plant immune responses triggered by rhizobial effectors.
Project description:Symbiotic associations between legumes and rhizobia usually commence with the perception of bacterial lipochitooligosaccharides, known as Nod factors (NF), which triggers rapid cellular and molecular responses in host plants. We report here deep untargeted tandem mass spectrometry-based measurements of rapid NF-induced changes in the phosphorylation status of 13,506 phosphosites in 7739 proteins from the model legume Medicago truncatula. To place these phosphorylation changes within a biological context, quantitative phosphoproteomic and RNA measurements in wild-type plants were compared with those observed in mutants, one defective in NF perception (nfp) and one defective in downstream signal transduction events (dmi3). Our study quantified the early phosphorylation and transcription dynamics that are specifically associated with NF-signaling, confirmed a dmi3-mediated feedback loop in the pathway, and suggested "cryptic" NF-signaling pathways, some of them being also involved in the response to symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.
Project description:The stabilization of host-symbiont mutualism against the emergence of parasitic individuals is pivotal to the evolution of cooperation. One of the most famous symbioses occurs between legumes and their colonizing rhizobia, in which rhizobia extract nutrients (or benefits) from legume plants while supplying them with nitrogen resources produced by nitrogen fixation (or costs). Natural environments, however, are widely populated by ineffective rhizobia that extract benefits without paying costs and thus proliferate more efficiently than nitrogen-fixing cooperators. How and why this mutualism becomes stabilized and evolutionarily persists has been extensively discussed. To better understand the evolutionary dynamics of this symbiosis system, we construct a simple model based on the continuous snowdrift game with multiple interacting players. We investigate the model using adaptive dynamics and numerical simulations. We find that symbiotic evolution depends on the cost-benefit balance, and that cheaters widely emerge when the cost and benefit are similar in strength. In this scenario, the persistence of the symbiotic system is compatible with the presence of cheaters. This result suggests that the symbiotic relationship is robust to the emergence of cheaters, and may explain the prevalence of cheating rhizobia in nature. In addition, various stabilizing mechanisms, such as partner fidelity feedback, partner choice, and host sanction, can reinforce the symbiotic relationship by affecting the fitness of symbionts in various ways. This result suggests that the symbiotic relationship is cooperatively stabilized by various mechanisms. In addition, mixed nodule populations are thought to encourage cheater emergence, but our model predicts that, in certain situations, cheaters can disappear from such populations. These findings provide a theoretical basis of the evolutionary dynamics of legume-rhizobia symbioses, which is extendable to other single-host, multiple-colonizer systems.
Project description:To circumvent the paucity of nitrogen sources in the soil Legume plants evolved a symbiotic interaction with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria called rhizobia. During symbiosis, legumes form root organs called nodules, where bacteria are housed intracellularly and become active nitrogen fixers known as bacteroids. Depending on their host plant, bacteroids can adopt different morphotypes, being either unmodified (U), elongated (E) or spherical (S). E- and S-typr bacteroids undergo a terminal differentiation leading to irreversible morphological changes and DNA endoreduplication. Previous studies suggest that differentiated bacteroids display an increased symbiotic efficiency (E>U & S>U). In this study, we used a combination of Aeschynomene species inducing E- and S-type bacteroids in symbiosis with Bradyrhizobium sp. ORS285 to show that S- performed better than E-type bacteroids. Thus, we performed a transcriptomic analysis on E- and S-type bacteroids to identify the bacterial functions involved in each bacteroid type.