Rhizobacteria Mediate the Phytotoxicity of a Range of Biorefinery‐Relevant Compounds

Abstract

Advances in engineering biology have expanded the list of renewable compounds that can be produced at scale via biological routes from plant biomass. In most cases, these chemical products have not been evaluated for effects on biological systems, defined in the present study as bioactivity, that may be relevant to their manufacture. For sustainable chemical and fuel production, the industry needs to transition from fossil to renewable carbon sources, resulting in unprecedented expansion in the production and environmental distribution of chemicals used in biomanufacturing. Further, although some chemicals have been assessed for mammalian toxicity, environmental and agricultural hazards are largely unknown. We assessed 6 compounds that are representative of the emerging biofuel and bioproduct manufacturing process for their effect on model plants ( Arabidopsis thaliana , Sorghum bicolor ) and show that several alter plant seedling physiology at submillimolar concentrations. However, these responses change in the presence of individual bacterial species from the A. thaliana root microbiome. We identified 2 individual microbes that change the effect of chemical treatment on root architecture and a pooled microbial community with different effects relative to its constituents individually. The present study indicates that screening industrial chemicals for bioactivity on model organisms in the presence of their microbiomes is important for biologically and ecologically relevant risk analyses. Environ Toxicol Chem 2019;38:1911–1922. © 2019 The Authors. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of SETAC.

Genetic modification of the shikimate pathway to reduce lignin content in switchgrass (Panicum virgatumL.) significantly impacts plant microbiomes

“…AMF hyphae provide a scaffold bridging the soil and root microbiomes (Wang et al, 2023). The addition of protocatechuate to the culture medium inhibited primary root growth but increased lateral root numbers in Arabidopsis (Herbert et al, 2019). The potential root morphology change may also influence AMF development and surrounding bacterial communities.…”

Iron Supplementation Eliminates Antagonistic Interactions Between Root-Associated Bacteria

“…We chose 11 rhizobacteria ( Table 1 and Supplementary Figure S1) representative of phyla previously detected as enriched within the roots of A. thaliana relative to bulk soil (Lundberg et al, 2012;Levy et al, 2017). These microbes are of general interest because they are well characterized and can improve plant health in the presence of specific environmental stressors (Herbert et al, 2019). We hypothesized that microbe-microbe interactions could be readily detected by tracking the frequency by which microbes inhibited the growth of their neighboring species.…”

Iron Supplementation Eliminates Antagonistic Interactions Between Root Associated Bacteria

“…We chose 11 rhizobacteria (Table 1, Supplemental Figure 1) representative of phyla previously detected as enriched within the roots of A. thaliana relative to bulk soil (Lundberg et al, 2012;Levy et al, 2017). These microbes are of general interest because they can improve plant health in the presence of specific environmental stressors (Herbert et al, 2019). We hypothesized that microbemicrobe interactions could be readily detected by tracking the frequency by which microbes inhibited the growth of their neighboring species.…”