2017 ASHS Annual Conference

It has long been assumed that soil microbes impact plant growth and nutrient uptake. However, in the last 10 years, innovations in sequencing technology have allowed a greater exploration and understanding of the interactions between plants and soil microbial communities. The primary drivers for this knowledge are next-generation sequencing (NGS), also called massively parallel sequencing, and shotgun metagenomics. NGS allows for the sequencing of an entire human genome in one day, or all the bacterial 16S rRNA in one soil sample in a few hours, while shotgun metagenomics provides a PCR-free method to sequence all the microbial genomes in a single sample. With NGS, for example, we can identify the differences in the bacterial community composition of two rhizosphere samples, however, with shotgun metagenomics we can also determine the differences in functions of those rhizosphere microbial communities. For this workshop, the uses and limitations of NGS and shotgun metagenomics for rhizosphere studies will be discussed. Rhizosphere extraction methods, the difficulties in accounting for sample heterogeneity, and the computational steps will be examined. Correlating sequence data, both NGS and shotgun metagenomics, with horticultural data has the potential to dramatically increase our understanding of rhizosphere and plant interactions.