Melissa
Uribe Acosta was born in Colombia and began her studies at the University of
Antioquia, in the BSc. Environmental and Industrial
Microbiology. She did her Bachelor’s internship at the Institute of Applied
Microbiology, Justus Liebig University under the supervision of Prof. Dr.
Sylvia Schnell and Dr. Christian Suarez on the topic of bacterial phosphate
mobilization. Then she enrolled in the MSc. in Biology in the track of
phytoremediation, where she developed her thesis on the microbiome associated with
two grasses growing on petroleum contaminated soil. During this time she also did
her internship at Groningen University, specifically, the Institute for Evolutionary
Life Sciences under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Joana Falcao Salles and PhD Student
Panji Mawarda about the impact of protozoa on the survival of Bacillus
strains. She is currently developing her PhD project at
the Department for Plant-Microbe interactions, Utrecht University, under the
supervision of Prof. Corné Pieterse and Dr. Ioannis Stringlis on the characterization
of plant-genotype traits involved in root microbiome assembly during biotic stress.
Role
of structural and chemical plant defense components on root-microbiome assembly
M.
URIBE ACOSTA, J. ZHOU, C.M.J. PIETERSE AND I.A.
STRINGLIS
Full
address lead author institution: Padualaan 8, 3584 CH, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Plant roots interact
in soil with pathogenic and beneficial bacteria. Structural (cutin, suberin,
callose, lignin) and chemical (camalexin,
glucosinolates, coumarins) defense components act as gatekeepers of microbial colonization.
They have been thoroughly characterized by restricting pathogens colonization, however,
their role in the assembly of a beneficial root microbiome or in the selection
of commensals in the rhizosphere remains underexplored. Here, we studied the microbiome composition in 16 soil-grown Arabidopsis mutants affected
in structural or chemical defense components and in different compartments
(soil-rhizosphere-root) using 16S rRNA sequencing. Compared to wild type (WT)
plants, cutin, suberin or the export of aliphatic glucosinolates mutants displayed
significantly altered microbiomes in all compartments, while mutants for indolic
glucosinolates or coumarin biosynthesis showed differences only in the rhizosphere.
In general structural defenses played a higher role in the endosphere microbiome
assembly while chemical defenses a higher role in the rhizosphere, showing that
plant mechanisms of microbial selection are compartment specific. When looking
at specific bacterial taxa changed in the root compartment compared to WT, most
bacteria belonged to the Oxalobacteraceae, while other bacterial
families had more mutant-specific patterns and will be targeted in future
analyses. Ultimately, we envision to unravel novel plant mechanisms of microbiome recruitment.