Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
G022 MCCARTY HALL
GAINESVILLE,FL 32611
Performing Department
Plant Pathology
Non Technical Summary
With the global population growing and expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, food production needs to increase by 70% by 2050. Yield gains due to modern agricultural practices, such as plant breeding and applications of chemicals and fertilizers, seem to have reached a plateau. The use of beneficial microbials is an alternative to reduce the amount of pesticides applied in agriculture, which, together with other agricultural management strategies, will help to produce food for consumers in a healthier and more sustainable way. My research will focus on assessing, extracting and manipulating bacteria from the phytobiome to manage plant disease, improve nutrient uptake and diminish the impact of abiotic stress. I will work on crops that are economically important to growers in Florida, such as common beans. By isolating microbes and/or manipulating their environment to favor the beneficial organisms, results from my research are expected to potentially decrease the need for chemical and fertilizer application, while increasing the quality of the food. The proposed project aligns with the following high priority issues: food security, sustainable agriculture, productivity.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
(1) identify the overall change in the bacterial community structure from seed parts (spermosphere, endospherme/embryo) that are under biotic and abiotic stresses; (2) isolate and test overrepresented bacterial taxa on biotic and abiotic stress suppression; (3) test the isolated bacteria against biotic and abiotic stresses in vivo; (4) study in vitro the bacterial phenotypes, such as biofilm formation, hormones production as well as secondary metabolites and antibiotics, which might lead to plant growth enhancement.
Project Methods
The study of seed microbiome for biotic and abiotic stress toleranceSeed collectionA preliminary test will be conducted with the bean seeds cultivar Prevail to find out if drought stress will affect the seed microbial community Initial experiments will be held at the greenhouse in the Department of Plant Pathology of the University of Florida. All plants will be watered (de Castro et al., 2019)Genomic DNA from the seeds (spermosphere, endosperm, and endosperm) will be isolated using the Quick-DNA Plant/Seed Miniprep Kit (Zymo Research). For QC for quantity, quality and purity, DNA from all the samples will be evaluated for quantity by using Qubit 3.0 Fluorometer (Life technologies InvitrogenTM), for quality by using standard agarose gel electrophoresis and for purity by using NanoDrop Spectrophotomet. A two-step amplification and dual-barcoding approach (Kozich et al., 2013) will be performed to generate Illumina-compatible amplicons. Universal bacterial primers 515F (59-GTGYCAGCMGCCGCGGTAA-39) and 806R (59-GGACTACNVGGGTWTCTAAT-39) will be used to amplify the v4 region of the 16S rRNA gene Parada, Needham and Fuhrman, 2016)(Foster et al., 2017)Ultimately, those overrepresented bacterial taxa that correlate with any positive plant phenotype will be isolated and tested as seed coat to mitigate drought.