By Blake Jackson
Soil microbes play a crucial role in supporting plant growth by improving nutrient absorption and enhancing resistance to diseases.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, regulating these communities of bacteria and fungi could offer a sustainable way to boost agricultural productivity.
However, a major challenge lies in the fact that many of these microbes remain dormant in the soil - and only active microbes can colonize plant roots and live within plant tissues.
A study by researchers at Penn State sheds light on this issue, revealing that microbial activity may be more important than abundance when it comes to successful plant colonization.
The study found that microbial activity inside plant tissues known as the endosphere - was ten times greater than in surrounding soil or in the rhizosphere, the soil directly around the roots.
The researchers suggested this is because plants provide more nutrients within their tissues. They also discovered that active microbes in the rhizosphere were far more likely to colonize the plant than those that were abundant but inactive.
“There is an enormous diversity of microbes in soils but only a small minority seem to be able to make it into plants,” explained Jennifer Harris, first author of the study and a doctoral candidate in Penn State’s Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Ecology.
“We saw that there seems to be a couple of families and groups that more commonly make it into the plant, but most soil microbes are dormant, so they must ‘wake up’ and exit dormancy to have the potential to carry out plant-beneficial functions.”
To identify active microbes, the team used a chemical-labeling method called BONCAT bioorthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging paired with flow cytometry and genetic sequencing to analyze the active microbial community.
“This is the first time BONCAT has been used to study microbes along the gradient from nearby soil to root surface to inside the root,” said study leader Estelle Couradeau, assistant professor of soils and environmental microbiology.
“This research offers a new way to identify which microbes actually ‘work’ in the soil-plant system by looking at their activity, not just their presence.”
Photo Credit: pexels-binyaminmellish
Categories: Pennsylvania, Education