Highlighted article: Davide Bulgarelli, Matthias Rott, Klaus Schlaeppi, Emiel Ver Loren van Themaat, Nahal Ahmadinejad, Federica Assenza, Philipp Rauf, Bruno Huettel, Richard Reinhardt, Elmon Schmelzer, Joerg Peplies, Frank Oliver Gloeckner, Rudolf Amann, Thilo Eickhorst, and Paul Schulze-Lefert (2012) Revealing structure and assembly cues for Arabidopsis root-inhabiting bacterial microbiota Nature 488:91
Background
Although plant-microbe and plant-soil dynamics are widely studied areas of plant science, up until now there has been no broad picture of plant endophytic systems: which phyla are common endophytes; how the populations form; and what affects them. Endophytes colonise plant tissues, where unlike pathogens they do not cause harm or an immune response, and unlike endosymbionts they do not live inside plant cells or have an obvious mutually beneficial relationship with the plant. A recent review on bacterial endophytes is this one by Reinhold-Hurek and Hurek (2011).
Here, Bulgarelli et al. use an Arabidopsis system to shed light on the specifics of below ground plant-bacteria interactions, and set out a methodology for future investigations into other plants and soil types. This study and another article in the same issue of Nature by Lundberg et al. use next generation sequencing (NGS) to show similar cues for assembly of root endophytes. (more…)
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