Soil microbes benefit plants by helping with nutrient uptake and disease resistance. Modulating these communities of bacteria and fungi could potentially sustainably improve agriculture, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. But a major obstacle to this approach has been that many of these microbes are dormant, or inactive, in the soil - and microbes must become active to colonize plant roots, moving into and living inside plant tissues. Until now, it hasn't been clear how dormancy affects which microbes make it into a plant, but in a new study using a novel technique, a team of researchers at Penn State found that a microbe's activity appears to matter more than abundancy.
They published their results in mSystems, a journal published by the American Society for Microbiology. The researchers found that microbial activity was 10 times higher inside the plant - the endosphere - compared to nearby soil or even soil right around the root - the rhizosphere. They hypothesized that the disparity likely resulted because plants provide more nutrients inside their tissues. Active microbes in the rhizosphere - soil right around the root - were more likely to colonize the plant than microbes that were abundant but more dormant.
