Sundar Lab

The Plant Microbiome

Complex microbial communities living in soil provide essential nutrients and help protect crops from disease. Understanding the effects of the microbiome on crop plants will enable the development of agricultural technologies that exploit the natural alliances among microbes and plants, and provide new routes to increase yields beyond conventional plant genetics and breeding.

Funding available for UC Davis graduate students to work on this project. If interested, contact us at sundar at ucdavis dot edu.

Rhizosphere of rice plant.

Co-PI: Venkatesan Sundaresan
University of California, Davis.

PI: Harsh Bais
College of Agriculture & Natural Resources,
University of Delaware

Co-PI: Jonathan Eisen
Genome Center,
University of California, Davis

Sampling rice plants

Rice plants selectively associate with sub-populations of soil microbes. Microbes associated with the roots of rice showed the greatest diversity of bacterial species. Bacterial species were present in the root sample that were not detected in the whole soil.

Taxonomic groupings from specific samples.

An hydroponic system is being established to grow rice plants in the presence and absence of a standardized stable microbe population. The response of the rice plants to these microbes will be assessed by transcriptomics using next generation sequencing techniques.

Hydroponically grown rice will be analyzed for changes in gene expression.

The specific genes determined to be up or down regulated in the presence of the microbes will be used to infer plant microbe crosstalk and help establish an understanding of the underlying symbiotic networks.