Engineers showed that some types of soil bacteria can influence a plant's balance of growth and defense. The bacteria produce an enzyme that can lower a plant's immune activity and allow its roots to grow longer than they would otherwise.
Engineers showed that some types of soil bacteria can influence a plant's balance of growth and defense. The bacteria produce an enzyme that can lower a plant's immune activity and allow its roots to grow longer than they would otherwise.
"This is trying to get at a really big biological question where there are not good answers -- about how microbiomes interface with host immune systems," said senior study author Jonathan Conway, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering."It's a small step in the direction of trying to understand how microbes live on hosts -- either plants or humans or other animals -- all the time and don't activate our immune responses constantly.
The team used both genetic and biochemical methods to demonstrate that the subtilase enzyme was indeed capable of degrading the specific segment of flagellin that triggers the immune response. The degradation was sufficient to tamp down the immune response and allow for increased growth inThe researchers ran into some snags when trying to purify the subtilase enzyme, said Samuel Eastman, a co-first author of the paper and a postdoctoral research associate in Conway's lab.
Naumann is a co-author on the paper, along with eight other Princeton researchers in addition to Eastman and Conway. The process of screening and verifying 165 bacterial isolates was a lengthy team effort, and six undergraduates were integral to this and other aspects of the work, said Conway. Britley Jones, a member of Princeton's Class of 2023, played a key role in screening the bacterial collection as part of her senior thesis.
Now, they would like to better understand why these enzymes may be advantageous to both bacteria and their plant hosts. One hypothesis is that chopping up the flagella of pathogens prevents them from moving and invading a plant's roots. "We don't want to compromise the immune system, but we also want plants to save that immune response for when it matters," he said."We want them to keep calm and keep growing."Samuel Eastman, Ting Jiang, Kaeli Ficco, Chao Liao, Britley Jones, Sarina Wen, Yvette Olivas Biddle, Aya Eyceoz, Ilya Yatsishin, Todd A. Naumann, Jonathan M. Conway.
Bacteria Microbes And More Genetics Microbiology Biotechnology And Bioengineering Botany Biology
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