A New Approach to Modify Plant Microbiomes and Traits by Introducing Beneficial Bacteria at Flowering into Progeny Seeds.

Birgit Mitter,Nikolaus Pfaffenbichler,Livio Antonielli,Angela Sessitsch,Alexandra Petric,Richard Flavell,Teresa Berninger,Muhammad Naveed,Geoffrey Von Maltzahn,Stéphane Compant,Raheleh Sheibani-Tezerji

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2017.00011

Birgit Mitter, Nikolaus Pfaffenbichler + Show 9 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2017.00011

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Abstract

The microbial component of healthy seeds – the seed microbiome – appears to be inherited between plant generations and can dynamically influence germination, plant performance, and survival. As such, methods to optimize the seed microbiomes of major crops could have far-reaching implications for plant breeding and crop improvement to enhance agricultural food, feed, and fiber production. Here, we describe a new approach to modulate seed microbiomes of elite crop seed embryos and concomitantly design the traits to be mediated by seed microbiomes. Specifically, we discovered that by introducing the endophyte Paraburkholderia phytofirmans PsJN to the flowers of parent plants we could drive its inclusion in progeny seed microbiomes, thereby inducing vertical inheritance to the offspring generation. We demonstrated the introduction of PsJN to seeds of monocot and dicot plant species and the consequential modifications to seed microbiome composition and growth traits in wheat, illustrating the potential role of novel seed-based microbiomes in determining plant traits.

Highlights

Plant internal microbiomes are complex communities of archaea, bacteria, and fungi, which live as endophytes in all plants (Turner et al, 2013; Hardoim et al, 2015)
Multivariate analysis of community structure and diversity was performed according to the recommendations by Anderson and Willis (2003): (1) unconstrained ordination offered by Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA), (2) constrained multidimensional scaling using Constrained Analysis of Principal Coordinates (CAP) as reimplemented in the vegan R package (Oksanen et al, 2015), (3) permutation test for assessing the significance of the constraints and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA), and (4) individuation and correlation of OTUs responsible for shaping the diversity structure
We evaluated whether the application of PsJN to flowers of dicotyledonous plants would result in colonization of their seed microbiomes and performed greenhouse experiments with soy

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Plant internal microbiomes are complex communities of archaea, bacteria, and fungi, which live as endophytes in all plants (Turner et al, 2013; Hardoim et al, 2015) Their importance to plant growth and survival has recently been recognized much more extensively, following the series of revelations in humans about the far reaching importance of microbiomes for well-being and health. Those bacteria and fungi that live in the soil and rhizosphere of plants have received most attention (Philippot et al, 2013). We describe a new approach of introducing new microbes into seeds (EndoSeedTM) to modify the plant microbiome and plant traits in defined ways It involves introducing a microbial strain into the parent plant before seed development is complete. Since the microorganisms are introduced into the seed, we use the concept seed in this paper for all plant species for the sake of simplicity

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