Comparative cell-specific profiling to understand the molecular basis of nodulation

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Plants must acquire the elemental nutrient nitrogen from their surrounding environment and its availability is often a major limitation to plant growth. To try and cope with this, all plants form lateral roots that explore the soil and increase the surface area on which to take up nitrogen. In addition legumes (peas and beans) have a unique strategy to deal with nitrogen limitation. They enter symbiotic interactions with soil bacteria that are able to fix an atmospheric form of nitrogen that plants cannot take up, and convert it into a useable form. Understanding more about how this happens could allow us to develop nodulation outside legume species, a discovery that would have significant effects on agriculture, the environment and nutrition. For example it would enable farmers to expand the range of crops that they could grow on their land without requiring the use of expensive nitrate fertilisers. Lower fertiliser use would in turn benefit the environment since the fossil-fuel rich process required for its manufacture would be diminished. Adding the ability to fix nitrogen to a commercial non-legume crop, for example wheat, might also increase plant nitrogen content and therefore the nutritive value of such improved crops for consumption. Since there are similarities in the way that lateral roots and nodules form on plant roots it is thought that the plan for 'building' a nodule in legumes comes from a lateral root 'blueprint' that exists in all plants. Despite detailed study of lateral roots and nodules little is known of what this 'blueprint' looks like. The answer might come from the fact that both lateral roots and nodules develop from single types of cells in the root - because of this specificity the important factors that link them have not yet been uncovered. We now have the state-of-the-art technology that will allows us to make the detailed analyses required for such study. We will compare legume vs. non-legume responses to nitrogen and responses during nodulation in single cells using these novel techniques to address how nodulation evolved in legumes.