Effect of High-Methionine Soybean on Rhizosphere Bacterial Communities

Plants use methionine for the production of ethylene, an important plant hormone. Previous studies have reported that high levels of methionine affects the rhizosphere bacterial population involved in soil nitrogen fixation. Thus, Jingang Liang of Nanjing Agricultural University (China) and colleagues examined if the transgenic line of Zigongdongdou soybean cultivar (ZD91) with improved methionine production could affect the populations of rhizosphere bacteria.

The researchers used 16S rRNA gene-based pyrosequencing analysis of the V4 region and DNA extracted from bacterial consortia collected from the rhizosphere of soybean plants grown in an agricultural field at the pod-setting stage and characterized the population structure of the bacterial communities. It was found that the dominant taxonomic groups were Acidobacteria, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi, Planctomycetes, Gemmatimonadetes, Firmicutes, and Verrucomicrobia. They did not find any statistically significant difference in the rhizosphere bacterial community structure between the non-transgenic and transgenic cultivars.

Read the research article in the open-access journal Plos One: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0103343.