Volatile communication between fungi and bacteria

Abstract

Why smell is so important for life on earth 9Chapter

The Chemistry of Stress: Understanding the ‘Cry for Help’ of Plant Roots

“…Previous study revealed that the rhizosphere bacteria of the species Serratia plymuthica upregulated their terpene synthase gene and produced sodorifen together with as yet structurally unknown terpenes as a response to terpenes produced by the fungal root pathogen Fusarium culmorum [82]. Further experiments revealed that exposure of Arabidopsis seedlings to the Serratia produced sodorifen induced expression of two plant defense-related genes PDF1.2 and PR1, coinciding with reduced infections by the pathogen [83]. Hence, it is plausible, that plant associated microbes are the first to sense the stress and produce specific metabolites to alert their host plant.…”

Extended Plant Metarhizobiome: Understanding Volatile Organic Compound Signaling in Plant-Microbe Metapopulation Networks

“…It is known that different microbial species produce distinct sets of VOCs ( 43 , 48 ), and their VOC production is affected by local microbial interactions and the surrounding environmental conditions ( 22 , 23 , 42 ). Moreover, airborne VOCs have been reported to alter soil microbial community composition ( 16 ), which is strongly correlated with the VOC emission profiles of “source” and “target” populations ( 49 – 51 ). Together, these findings support the concept that an initial VOC signal could blend with the VOCs emitted by adjacent microbial populations, leading to the amplification or complementation of the original signal and a potential increase in the total amount and diversity of emitted VOCs ( Fig.…”

“…VOC-mediated signaling could also help plants to defend against pathogen attack. For example, in response to VOCs produced by the fungal pathogen Fusarium culmorum , the bacterium Serratia plymuthica has been shown to upregulate the production of sodorifen VOC ( 51 ), which induced the expression of plant defense-related genes in Arabidopsis thaliana ( 64 ). It is thus plausible that microbes are the first to sense the stress and produce specific metabolites to alert their host plant, as has also been suggested by Rizaludin et al ( 65 ).…”

The ecological role of volatile mediated interactions belowground

“…The annotation of final contigs for all bacteria were performed with a modified version of PROKKA V1.11 (Seemann 2014) and COG annotations were obtained as described by Tyc et al (2017a) and manually adapted according to available descriptions of gene functions. Annotation of the F. culmorum genome was available from a previous study (Schmidt 2017 Xia et al 2015). Compounds were accounted as produced for each treatment when the average peak intensity for all replicates per treatment was at least 2-fold higher and significant different (Student's T-test, P < 0.05) from the controls.…”