Cross-kingdom signalling regulates spore germination in the moss Physcomitrella patens

Eleanor F Vesty,Fatemeh Ghaderiardakani,Miguel Cámara,Xiaoguang Liu,Juliet C Coates,Wesal Tanko,Kirsty Jones,Nigel Halliday,Sarah Needs,Amy L Whitbread

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-59467-5

Abstract

Plants live in close association with microorganisms that can have beneficial or detrimental effects. The activity of bacteria in association with flowering plants has been extensively analysed. Bacteria use quorum-sensing as a way of monitoring their population density and interacting with their environment. A key group of quorum sensing molecules in Gram-negative bacteria are the N-acylhomoserine lactones (AHLs), which are known to affect the growth and development of both flowering plants, including crops, and marine algae. Thus, AHLs have potentially important roles in agriculture and aquaculture. Nothing is known about the effects of AHLs on the earliest-diverging land plants, thus the evolution of AHL-mediated bacterial-plant/algal interactions is unknown. In this paper, we show that AHLs can affect spore germination in a representative of the earliest plants on land, the Bryophyte moss Physcomitrella patens. Furthermore, we demonstrate that sporophytes of some wild isolates of Physcomitrella patens are associated with AHL-producing bacteria.

Highlights

Plants do not exist in isolation in the environment, but interact with a wide array of organisms from all kingdoms including bacteria, fungi, animals and other plants
A key way in which bacteria communicate with one another is via diffusible quorum sensing (QS) molecules that are used to monitor and respond to population density within a colony or biofilm[13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
We show that synthetic acylhomoserine lactones (AHLs) can promote spore germination in the model moss species Physcomitrella patens[77,78] in a lab-based assay

Summary

Introduction

Plants do not exist in isolation in the environment, but interact with a wide array of organisms from all kingdoms including bacteria, fungi, animals and other plants. These interactions can have profound effects on plant fitness, growth and development. Substitutions can occur at the third carbon position (C3), enabling the molecule to either be unsubstituted, or to possess a ketone group (oxo, O) or a hydroxyl group (OH). These structural differences contribute to their specific impact on gene expression[28,29]

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