Root exudate metabolites drive plant-soil feedbacks on growth and defense by shaping the rhizosphere microbiota

By Lingfei Hu, C. Robert, Selma Cadot, Xi Zhang, M. Ye, Beibei Li, Daniele Manzo, Noémie Chervet, T. Steinger, M. V. D. van der Heijden and 2 more. Nature Communications, 2018

1,298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By changing soil properties, plants can modify their growth environment. Although the soil microbiota is known to play a key role in the resulting plant-soil feedbacks, the proximal mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain unknown. We found that benzoxazinoids, a class of defensive secondary metabolites that are released by roots of cereals such as wheat and maize, alter root-associated fungal and bacterial communities, decrease plant growth, increase jasmonate signaling and plant defenses, and suppress herbivore performance in the next plant generation. Complementation experiments demonstrate that the benzoxazinoid breakdown product 6-methoxy-benzoxazolin-2-one (MBOA), which accumulates in the soil during the conditioning phase, is both sufficient and necessary to trigger the observed phenotypic changes. Sterilization, fungal and bacterial profiling and complementation experiments reveal that MBOA acts indirectly by altering root-associated microbiota. Our results reveal a mechanism by which plants determine the composition of rhizosphere microbiota, plant performance and plant-herbivore interactions of the next generation. Plants can modify soil microbiota through root exudation, but how this process influences plant health in turn is often unclear. Here, Hu et al. show that maize benzoxazinoids released into the soil modify root-associated microbiota and thereby increase leaf defenses of the next plant generation.

Subfields: Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0e94c0c4435fc8d01b2d5072295cd81a6028058

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In Plant Science

1. A. Sessitsch
2. S. Compant
3. M. S. Mirza
4. Yang Bai
5. A. Imran
6. Alain Goossens
7. A. Osbourn

Citations in the corpus

• A review on the plant microbiome: Ecology, functions, and emerging trends in microbial application (2019, background): “For instance, a group of defensive secondary metabolites like benzoxazinoids (BXs) released by maize roots alter the composition of root-associated microbiota, and microorganisms belonging to Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria were found to be most affected by BXs metabolites [18].”
• A specialized metabolic network selectively modulates Arabidopsis root microbiota (2019, background): “S17), suggesting that they may have a role in interactions with root microbes (34).”
• The Remarkably Strong Arctic Stratospheric Polar Vortex of Winter 2020: Links to Record‐Breaking Arctic Oscillation and Ozone Loss (2020, background): “15 of 21 the strength of the vortex (e.g., Hu et al., 2018; Xie et al., 2020).”
• Rhizosphere Engineering With Plant Growth-Promoting Microorganisms for Agriculture and Ecological Sustainability (2021, background): “Rhizobacteria mediated ISR induction in plants stimulates the release of some antimicrobial components such as benzoxazinoids and coumarin, which further increase the induction of ISR triggering strains (Hu et al., 2018; Stringlis et al., 2018).”