Abstract
Drought is a major abiotic stress affecting plant growth and development. Sugarcane, a sugar crop planted in warmer climate, suffers dramatically from drought stress. Bacterial communities colonizing the rhizosphere, where roots sense drought stress initially, have been well studied for their beneficial effects on plant growth and health. The Ea-DREB2B gene cloned from the sugarcane, Saccharum arundinaceum, belongs to the DREB2 subgroup of the DREB gene family, which is involved in drought response regulation. Here, we present a detailed characterization of the rhizoplane, rhizosphere, and bulk soil bacterial communities determined using a high-sequencing approach with the transgenic (TG) sugarcane variety GN18 harboring the drought-tolerant Ea-DREB2B gene and its isogenic wild-type (WT) variety FN95-1702 under the same environmental conditions. In addition, the total carbon (TC), total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorus (TP) contents in each soil area were compared to explore the relationship between bacterial alteration in the TG and WT plants and environmental factors (TC, TN, TP, C:N, C:P, and N:P). Our results showed that the bacterial communities in the rhizosphere and rhizoplane of TG sugarcane were more similar and perfectly correlated with the environmental factors than those of the WT. This suggested that the bacterial communities of the TG plants were altered in response to the changes in root exudates. The results of our study suggest that the change in soil environment caused by transgenic sugarcane alters soil bacterial communities.
Highlights
Plants are intimately intertwined with the microbial communities living in and around them (Naylor et al, 2017)
We demonstrated that droughtresistant TG sugarcane shapes the root-associated bacterial community assembly, which may in turn contribute to the ability of the host plant to respond appropriately to abiotic environmental stress
Our results confirm that the diversity and composition of the bacterial communities of TG plants considerably differed from those of WT, with respect to both root-associated area and bulk soil, indicating that the genetic modification altered the plant-associated bacterial communities
Summary
Plants are intimately intertwined with the microbial communities living in and around them (Naylor et al, 2017). The rhizosphere is a small compartment of the soil that is adjacent to and directly affected by the plant roots, and it has long been regarded as one of the most important interfaces for life on Earth. The rhizoplane is the root surface that forms the interface between the plant root and rhizosphere soil (Ding et al, 2019). Drought-Tolerant Ea-DREB2B on Soil Bacterial Communities plant and microbiomes colonized in the rhizosphere. Considering the contribution of microbial–plant interactions for plant growth and development, numerous studies have focused on the influence of GM stress-resistant plants on soil- and root-associated bacterial communities (Dunfield and Germida, 2004; Sohn et al, 2016; Ibarra et al, 2020). It is important to assess the specific effect of each GM plant on the soil environment and community
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