Microbial Determinants of Plant Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses

“在自然土壤中，养分稀缺且分布不均。它们支持大量栖息在土壤中的生物体的生命，包括植物和微生物群，它们已经发展出竞争营养物质并有效吸收营养物质的机制。目前还不清楚在这些不同营养素的竞争过程中释放的化合物是否“告知”植物根部如何避免极端竞争并找到新的营养素。通过这个项目，我们将研究土壤中存在的复杂化学景观，特别是来自细菌的化合物，如何影响根部的决策过程，以探索土壤中的营养斑块并激活营养反应。这将使我们能够为内源性根系发育和植物营养途径添加新的调节成分，并更好地了解植物如何感知土壤中的营养物质。重要的是，我们将（a）鉴定和表征具有调节植物对低营养水平的反应的能力的新型细菌外代谢酶。(b)为微生物如何帮助植物在土壤中生存提供了新的证据（c）我们将发现新的和重要的土壤养分吸收调节机制。这项工作的自然延伸将是a）在其他经济上重要的植物中进一步验证这些发现B）在更相关的生态环境中测试所描述的外代谢和所描述的机制的效果。

"In natural soils, nutrients are scarce and distributed heterogeneously. They support the life of a large number of organisms that inhabit the soil, including plants and microbiota, which have developed mechanisms to compete for nutrients and assimilate them efficiently. It is unknown whether the chemical compounds that are released during these competitions for different nutrients 'inform' plant roots about how to avoid extreme competition and find new patches of nutrients. With this project we will study how the complex chemical landscape existing in the soil, with special interest in compounds derived from bacteria, influences the decision-making process in the root to explore nutrient patches in the soil and activate the nutritional response. This will allow us to add new regulatory components to endogenous root development and plant nutritional pathways and better understand how the plant senses nutrients in the soil. Importantly, we will (a) identify and characterize novel bacterial exometabolites with the ability to modulate plant response to low nutrient levels. (b) provide new evidence on how microbes help plants survive in soils (c) we will discover new and important mechanisms for the regulation of nutrient uptake in soils.A natural extension of this work would be to a) further validate these findings in other economically important plants b) test the effect of the described exometabolites and the described mechanisms in more relevant ecological contexts.