Leibniz Association

About: Leibniz Association is a government organization based out in Berlin, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Gene. The organization has 16586 authors who have published 35691 publications receiving 1095107 citations. The organization is also known as: Leibniz-Gemeinschaft & Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Rhizosphere microbiome mediates systemic root metabolite exudation by root-to-root signaling.

Abstract: Microbial communities associated with roots confer specific functions to their hosts, thereby modulating plant growth, health, and productivity. Yet, seminal questions remain largely unaddressed including whether and how the rhizosphere microbiome modulates root metabolism and exudation and, consequently, how plants fine tune this complex belowground web of interactions. Here we show that, through a process termed systemically induced root exudation of metabolites (SIREM), different microbial communities induce specific systemic changes in tomato root exudation. For instance, systemic exudation of acylsugars secondary metabolites is triggered by local colonization of bacteria affiliated with the genus Bacillus Moreover, both leaf and systemic root metabolomes and transcriptomes change according to the rhizosphere microbial community structure. Analysis of the systemic root metabolome points to glycosylated azelaic acid as a potential microbiome-induced signaling molecule that is subsequently exuded as free azelaic acid. Our results demonstrate that rhizosphere microbiome assembly drives the SIREM process at the molecular and chemical levels. It highlights a thus-far unexplored long-distance signaling phenomenon that may regulate soil conditioning.

FungalTraits: a user-friendly traits database of fungi and fungus-like stramenopiles

Abstract: The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identification of the guild in environmental studies. Over the past decades, rapid development and affordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved insights of the fungal diversity in all ecosystems and habitats. Yet, in spite of the progress of molecular methods, knowledge about functional properties of the fungal taxa is vague and interpretation of environmental studies in an ecologically meaningful manner remains challenging. In order to facilitate functional assignments and ecological interpretation of environmental studies we introduce a user friendly traits and character database FungalTraits operating at genus and species hypothesis levels. Combining the information from previous efforts such as FUNGuild and Fun(Fun) together with involvement of expert knowledge, we reannotated 10,210 and 151 fungal and Stramenopila genera, respectively. This resulted in a stand-alone spreadsheet dataset covering 17 lifestyle related traits of fungal and Stramenopila genera, designed for rapid functional assignments of environmental studies. In order to assign the trait states to fungal species hypotheses, the scientific community of experts manually categorised and assigned available trait information to 697,413 fungal ITS sequences. On the basis of those sequences we were able to summarise trait and host information into 92,623 fungal species hypotheses at 1% dissimilarity threshold.