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

植物必须从周围环境中获取营养元素氮，而氮的可用性往往是植物生长的主要限制因素。为了解决这个问题，所有的植物都形成了侧根，这些侧根会深入土壤，增加吸收氮的表面积。此外，豆类（豌豆和豆类）有一个独特的策略来处理氮限制。它们与土壤细菌进行共生互动，这些细菌能够固定植物无法吸收的大气氮形式，并将其转化为可用的形式。更多地了解这是如何发生的，可以让我们在豆科植物物种之外发展结瘤，这一发现将对农业、环境和营养产生重大影响。例如，它将使农民能够在不需要使用昂贵的硝酸盐肥料的情况下扩大他们在土地上种植的作物范围。减少化肥的使用反过来又有利于环境，因为制造化肥所需的化石燃料丰富的过程将会减少。将固定氮的能力添加到商业非豆科作物中，例如小麦，也可能增加植物的氮含量，从而提高这些改良作物的营养价值。由于侧根和根瘤在植物根部形成的方式有相似之处，因此人们认为豆科植物“构建”根瘤的计划来自于所有植物中存在的侧根“蓝图”。尽管对侧根和结节进行了详细的研究，但人们对这张“蓝图”的样子知之甚少。答案可能来自这样一个事实，即侧根和根瘤都是从根中的单一类型的细胞发育而来的——由于这种特异性，将它们联系起来的重要因素尚未被发现。我们现在拥有最先进的技术，这将使我们能够进行这种研究所需的详细分析。我们将比较豆科植物和非豆科植物对氮的反应以及单细胞结瘤期间的反应，利用这些新技术来研究豆科植物结瘤的进化过程。

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.