Soybean Root Hairs: A Model for Single-Cell Plant Biology

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PI: Gary Stacey (University of Missouri)Co-PIs: Jianlin Cheng (University of Missouri) and Dong Xu (University of Missouri)Collaborators: David Koppenaal (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Ljiljana Pa?a-Toliæ (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)Systems biology is the comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the manner in which all components of a biological system interact. The ultimate goal is a new, predictive view of cellular function, supplanting the older descriptive understanding. However, even with the availability of advanced technologies, systems biology has yet to achieve its promise due to a variety of issues, not the least of which is the overall complexity of biological systems. The project reduces this complexity by studying the response of a single, plant cell type, the root hair, to infection by the beneficial nitrogen fixing bacterium, Bradyrhizobium japonicum. The current project builds on past work that has developed the soybean root hair cell as an ideal model for genomic study. The goal is to focus specifically on the regulatory networks that control the infection process leading to the successful establishment of a nitrogen fixing symbiosis. Beyond its relevance to systems biology, the work promises to yield new insights into plant cellular function, root development and the nitrogen fixation process, which is of great agronomic and ecological importance. The root hair is the first site of plant response to bacteria during the nitrogen fixation process. Therefore, identifying the plant response pathways at a systems level could provide new avenues for manipulating nitrogen fixation in crop plants. The project will yield sequence data that will be made publicly available through GenBank and through our project website (www.soyroothair.org), as well as the Soybean Knowledgebase (www.SoyKB.org). The latter is being designed as a comprehensive resource to house, visualize and analyze all types of soybean functional genomic data. The project has a substantial outreach and educational component that partners with the University to address K-12, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral training.