Collaborative Research: MSB: Defining Plant-Associated Metagenomics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

All land plants grow in association with complex microbial communities both on aboveground plant organs (called the phyllosphere) and below the ground on roots (called therhizosphere). The relationships between a microbiota (the community of microbesintimately associated with a plant) and its host can vary from pathogenic to symbiotic.The microbiome (the set of genes encoded by any particular microbiota) can performecosystem services by providing the host plant with critical nutrients, protection frompathogens, production of functional plant hormones, and provision of tolerance tostressors like heat. The plant, in turn, provides the microbiome with an improvedenvironment, including a complex array of energy sources released by deposition ofplant-based sugars into the soil. Decaying plant tissue and carbon-rich root exudatesredirect large amounts of fixed atmospheric carbon to the soil, making the rhizosphere alarge carbon sequestration zone, important in the balance of carbon in a changingenvironment. Site specific characteristics of climate and soil that influence the yield ofmaize and other crops and the productivity of any plant community rely in part on therespective rhizosphere microbiome. This research will ultimately lead to agriculturalpractices designed to increase plant health and productivity, carbon sequestration, anddisease resistance through the rational utilization of the probiotic capacity of soils andthe local environment. The project team is a collaborative interdisciplinary group fromUNC-Chapel Hill, Cornell and the DOE Joint Genome Institute. The experiments to becarried out will define the rhizosphere microbiota and associated microbiome using twoimportant model plant species: Arabidopsis thaliana, the premier model for rapiddiscovery in plant biology, and Zea mays, the premier model for genetic dissection ofcomplex traits in crops. Data generated by the project will be made freely available (http://www.bio.unc.edu/dangl/lab/projects/Metagenome_2-3-10.htm; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/), and will provide starting points for a variety of deeper studies into the complexities of host-microbe interactions. The project will provide training opportunities for undergraduates, doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows.