Microbial Determinants of Plant Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses

"In natural soils, nutrients are scarce and distributed heterogeneously. They support the life of a large number of organisms that inhabit the soil, including plants and microbiota, which have developed mechanisms to compete for nutrients and assimilate them efficiently. It is unknown whether the chemical compounds that are released during these competitions for different nutrients 'inform' plant roots about how to avoid extreme competition and find new patches of nutrients. With this project we will study how the complex chemical landscape existing in the soil, with special interest in compounds derived from bacteria, influences the decision-making process in the root to explore nutrient patches in the soil and activate the nutritional response. This will allow us to add new regulatory components to endogenous root development and plant nutritional pathways and better understand how the plant senses nutrients in the soil. Importantly, we will (a) identify and characterize novel bacterial exometabolites with the ability to modulate plant response to low nutrient levels. (b) provide new evidence on how microbes help plants survive in soils (c) we will discover new and important mechanisms for the regulation of nutrient uptake in soils.
A natural extension of this work would be to a) further validate these findings in other economically important plants b) test the effect of the described exometabolites and the described mechanisms in more relevant ecological contexts.