A plant may be rooted in place, but it is never lonely. There are bacteria in, on and near it, munching away on their host, on each other, on compounds in the soil. Amoebae dine on bacteria, nematodes feast on roots, insects devour fruit — with consequences for the chemistry of the soil, the taste of a leaf or the productivity of a crop.
From 30 June to 2 July, more than 200 researchers gathered in Washington DC for the first meeting of the Phytobiomes Initiative, an ambitious proposal to catalogue and characterize a plant’s most intimate associates and their impact on agriculture. By the end of the year, attendees hope to carve out a project that will apply this knowledge in ways that will appeal to funders in industry and government.
The effects of microbes and insects on plant health have often been studied in pairs — one microbe and one plant. But advances in genetic sequencing have opened up ways to survey entire microbial communities. Meanwhile, engineers and computational biologists have developed better ways to manage large data sets, merge disparate recordings into cohesive models and rapidly collect information on the physiology of every plant in a field.
“Historically, we haven’t had the capacity to look at this as a system,” says plant pathologist Jan Leach at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “Now we need to begin to integrate not just the data about the plant and the plant’s environment, but all the biological components in that system.”
Work has already begun along these lines: for example, a group at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños in the Philippines is fishing for microbial DNA in data discarded from an effort to sequence the rice genome. The goal is to determine which microbes prefer which strains of the crop.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Plant denizens get the big-science treatment
