Back

Evidence for microbiome-dependent chilling tolerance in Sorghum

Erlandson, S.; Bheemanahalli, R.; Johnson, M.; Narayana, N. K.; Graham, C.; Jagadish, K.; Subramanian, S.

2021-03-03 plant biology
10.1101/2021.03.02.433195 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Early season chilling stress is a major constraint on sorghum production in temperate climates. Chilling-tolerant sorghum is an active area of development, but the potential for early season microbial-enhanced chilling tolerance in sorghum has not yet been explored. In this study, we characterized traits of field-grown sorghum accessions in response to chilling and non-chilling temperatures and the corresponding cohorts of phyllosphere fungal and bacterial taxa. Further, we characterized the effects of chilling temperatures and microbial inoculation on sorghum accession traits in a growth chamber experiment. By comparing sorghum trait responses under chilling stress with and without soil microbial inoculation, we were able to detect a potential microbe-dependent sorghum response to chilling stress. Four sorghum genotypes showed a negative response to chilling stress with vs. without microbial inoculation, while five sorghum accessions show increased shoot biomass or leaf area under chilling stress when inoculated with a soil microbiome. These differential responses provides opportunities to exploit beneficial microbial taxa for enhancing early-stage chilling tolerance in sorghum, with a potential to be extended to other crops.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.