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Latebreaking Poster

Session: Interdisciplinary Tools to Advance Ecology (Latebreaking)

LB 26-219 - Host, microbe, environment: a novel high-throughput plant growth system to conduct tripartite screening of plant-microbe interactions

Thursday, August 10, 2023
5:00 PM – 6:30 PM PDT
Location: ESA Exhibit Hall
Plants are host to diverse communities of bacteria that live on their roots (in the “rhizosphere”). Effects of these bacteria on plants range from beneficial (e.g. plant growth-promoting, protective) to pathogenic (disease causing), and the degree to which bacteria can help or harm plants is modulated by the environment in which they live. This tripartite interaction (host-microbe-environment) is challenging to study because factorial combinations of these variables scale exponentially. To overcome this logistical limitation, we developed a 3D printed high-throughput plant growth system for the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Our system germinates and inoculates plants in a 96-well format, which makes it compatible with liquid handling robots to allow fast and accurate preparation of bacterial inoculants and media types. We present proof-of-viability experiments showing how varying inoculation ratios between opportunistic pathogens and protective isolates alters disease outcome. Additionally, we find that the required pathogen:protective ratio for infection changes depending on plant age. Finally, we demonstrate how this system can be used to screen wild bacterial isolates for protective and pathogenic effects, allowing us to test hypotheses about the evolutionary and ecological relationship between pathogens and protectives at an unprecedented scale. This system expands the capacity at which we are able to test plant-microbe-environment interactions and makes feasible powerful large-scale experiments that address challenging ecological and applied questions in plant microbiome research.