Speaker
Description
Microbes play a key role in plant health and development. They inhabit various plant tissues and are present throughout the plant’s life cycle. Over this journey through space and time, the microbial composition changes and adapts—this is also true when the plant encounters challenging conditions. Plants can recruit and modulate beneficial microbes; however, we still do not fully understand the mechanisms behind this complex process.
Our group has conducted an extensive ecological study in which Arabidopsis thaliana plants from contrasting natural environments were sampled over several years. Phenotypic and transcriptomic profiling of the plants was performed. More recently, microbiome profiling was carried out using two complementary approaches: amplicon sequencing and shotgun metagenomics. We are now analyzing this complex dataset to investigate how different plant traits and gene expression patterns impact microbial composition—and vice versa.
Preliminary results show that seasonality plays a significant role in shaping the microbial composition of A. thaliana. The bacterial community in A. thaliana leaves is highly diverse, with many genera (>40%) represented at less than 5% of relative abundance. Nonetheless, Sphingomonas is consistently the most abundant genus in many plants across different locations and years.
We are now further exploring the fungal community and attempting to recover microbial genomes from the shotgun metagenomic data. Our next step will be to integrate the phenotypic and transcriptomic profiling of the plants with the microbiome data. We hope this will help elucidate some of the mechanisms underlying the complex interactions between plants and microbes in natural environments.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
|---|---|
| Poster Presentation Option | Yes, I’m willing to present as a poster. |
