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Abstract

Casparian strips (CS) are famous apoplastic barriers situated in the endodermal cell walls where they facilitate control over nutrient uptake. Much like tight junctions in the mammalian gut. In recent years we have gained a tremendous amount of mechanistic insight into how the CS barrier system is established and how its functions are executed. However, as most of this work is done in the model species Arabidopsis thaliana, we know very little of the role of CS in other species. Of particular interest are plants that undergo specialized symbiotic relationships with microbes as this require tight communication with the vasculature – One interesting case are the nodule-forming, nitrogen-fixing legumes where the CS may influence the ability of the plant to respond to N stress. In pursuit to understand this, we investigated CS formation in the symbiosis model Lotus japonicus.

Our work identifies and characterize Lotus mutants without CS. Through a number of analyses, we were able to gain detailed insights into how nodule formation is related to root-shoot communication in a barrier dependent manner. Moreover, since the nodules themselves were also devoid of vascular-associated CS, we performed correlative meta transcript- and metabolomic analysis to probe the status of nodule residing bacteriods in situations where flow to-and-from plant tissues were unrestricted. Combined, our work highlights an overlooked importance of CS in establishment of symbiotic relationships and thereby puts focus on the root barrier systems as an intriguing tool for engineered N-fixation.

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Tonni Grube Andersen est chef d'équipe au Max Planck for plant breeding research de Cologne. Ses travaux portent sur les barrières apoplastiques dans les racines des plantes. Il considère la racine comme une partie d’un ecosystème et donc comme une ressource pour le microbiome environnant. Il étudie ainsi les relations entre le niveau d’établissement des barrières et les interactions avec le microbiote racinaire, les processus génétiques mis en place pour la formation mais également le rôle des discontinuités dans la physiologie de la plante.

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