Drought Changes Root Microbiome
Drought can have a lasting impact on the community of microbes that live in and around roots of rice plants, a team led by UC Davis researchers has found. Root-associated microbes help plants take up nutrients from the soil, so the finding could help in understanding how rice responds to dry spells and how it can be made more resilient to drought. The work was published July 22 in Nature Plants.
The root microbiome of irrigated rice plants goes through a sequence of changes as the plants grow and stabilizes when they flower. The sequence of changes in the root microbiome is consistent for a particular rice strain and geographic location. Previous work has shown that when a growing rice plant is deprived of water, it hits pause on the succession of changes in the root microbiome.
Venkatesan Sundaresan, a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Biology and colleagues looked at changes in rice root microbes over time when plants were deprived of water for 11, 21 or 33 days. This kind of intermittent drought condition is more common in rain-fed crops than terminal drought, Sundaresan said.