Project description:The bacterium, Sinorhizobium meliloti, interacts symbiotically with leguminous plants such as Medicago truncatula to form nitrogen-fixing root nodules. During symbiosis, plant and bacterial cells differentiate in a coordinated manner, resulting in specialized plant cells that contain nitrogen-fixing bacteroids. Medicago nodules are organized in structurally distinct tissue zones, representing different stages of bacterial and plant differentiation. We used laser-capture microdissection (LCM) to analyze bacterial and plant gene expression in four root nodule regions. In parallel, we analyzed gene expression in nodules formed by wild type bacteria on six plant mutants with nitrogen fixation deficiencies (dnf). We found that bacteroid metabolism is drastically remodeled during bacteroid differentiation. Many processes required for bacterial growth are down-regulated in the nitrogen fixation zone. The overall transcriptional changes are similar to those occurring during nutrient limitation by the stringent response. We also observed differential expression of bacterial genes involved in nitrogen fixation, cell envelope homeostasis, cell division, stress response and polyamine biosynthesis at distinct stages of nodule development. In M. truncatula we observed the differential regulation of several host processes that may trigger bacteroid differentiation and control bacterial infection. We analyzed plant and bacterial gene expression simultaneously, which allowed us to correlate processes in both organisms.
2015-06-01 | GSE53705 | GEO
Project description:Land uses alter nitrogen-fixing bacteria community composition in a Mollisol
Project description:During the legume-rhizobium symbiosis, free-living soil bacteria known as rhizobia trigger the formation of root nodules. The rhizobia infect these organs and adopt an intracellular lifestyle within the symbiotic nodule cells where they become nitrogen-fixing bacteroids. Several legume lineages enforce their symbionts into an extreme cellular differentiation, comprising cell enlargement and genome endoreduplication. The antimicrobial peptide transporter BclA is a major determinant of this differentiation process in Bradyrhizobium sp. ORS285, a symbiont of Aeschynomene spp.. In the absence of BclA, Bradyrhizobium sp. ORS285 proceeds until the intracellular infection of nodule cells but the bacteria cannot differentiate into enlarged polyploid bacteroids and fix nitrogen. The nodule bacteria of the bclA mutant constitute thus an intermediate stage between the free-living soil bacteria and the intracellular nitrogen-fixing bacteroids. Metabolomics on whole nodules of Aeschynomene afraspera and Aeschynomene indica infected with the ORS285 wild type or the bclA mutant revealed 47 metabolites that differentially accumulated concomitantly with bacteroid differentiation. Bacterial transcriptome analysis of these nodules discriminated nodule-induced genes that are specific to differentiated and nitrogen-fixing bacteroids and others that are activated in the host microenvironment irrespective of bacterial differentiation and nitrogen fixation. These analyses demonstrated that the intracellular settling of the rhizobia in the symbiotic nodule cells is accompanied with a first transcriptome switch involving several hundreds of upregulated and downregulated genes and a second switch accompanying the bacteroid differentiation, involving less genes but that are expressed to extremely elevated levels. The transcriptomes further highlighted the dynamics of oxygen and redox regulation of gene expression during nodule formation and we discovered that bclA represses the expression of non-ribosomal peptide synthetase gene clusters suggesting a non-symbiotic function of BclA. Together, our data uncover the metabolic and gene expression changes that accompany the transition from intracellular bacteria into differentiated nitrogen-fixing bacteroids.
2019-06-01 | GSE126971 | GEO
Project description:Community structure of nitrogen-fixing bacteria
Project description:Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of climate warming and cooling on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, four years after soil transplant over large transects from northern (N site) to central (NC site) and southern China (NS site) and vice versa. Four years after soil transplant, soil nitrogen components, microbial biomass, community phylogenetic and functional structures were altered. Microbial functional diversity, measured by a metagenomic tool named GeoChip, and phylogenetic diversity are increased with temperature, while microbial biomass were similar or decreased. Nevertheless, the effects of climate change was overridden by maize cropping, underscoring the need to disentangle them in research. Mantel tests and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) demonstrated that vegetation, climatic factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation), soil nitrogen components and CO2 efflux were significantly correlated to the microbial community composition. Further investigation unveiled strong correlations between carbon cycling genes and CO2 efflux in bare soil but not cropped soil, and between nitrogen cycling genes and nitrification, which provides mechanistic understanding of these microbe-mediated processes and empowers an interesting possibility of incorporating bacterial gene abundance in greenhouse gas emission modeling.
2013-10-30 | GSE51592 | GEO
Project description:Land uses alter the nitrogen-fixing bacterial community in a Mollisol
| PRJNA754807 | ENA
Project description:Soil microbiome below biocrusts in a citrus agroecosystem
| PRJNA635358 | ENA
Project description:nitrogen cycling in agroecosystem
Project description:Here we have compared adult wildtype (N2) C. elegans gene expression when grown on different bacterial environments/fod sources in an effort to model naturally occuring nematode-bacteria interactions at the Konza Prairie. We hypothesize that human-induced changes to natural environments, such as the addition of nitrogen fertalizer, have effects on the bacterial community in soils and this drives downstream changes in the structure on soil bacterial-feeding nematode community structure. Here we have used transcriptional profiling to identify candidate genes involved in the interaction of nematodes and bacteria in nature.