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Submerged plants can thrive entirely underwater, playing a crucial role in maintaining water quality, supporting aquatic organisms, and enhancing sediment stability. However, they face multiple challenges, including reduced light availability, fluctuating water conditions, and limited nutrient access. Despite these stresses, submerged plants demonstrate remarkable resilience through physiological and biochemical adaptations. Additionally, their interactions with microbial communities are increasingly recognized as pivotal in mitigating these environmental stresses. Understanding the diversity of these microbial communities is crucial for comprehending the complex interactions between submerged plants and their environments. This research aims to identify and screen microbes from submerged plant samples capable of producing 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC) deaminase and to explore microbial diversity through metagenomic analysis. Microbes were isolated and screened for ACC deaminase production, and metagenomic techniques, including co-occurrence network analysis, were used to examine microbial diversity and interactions within the communities. ACC deaminase-producing microbes can significantly enhance plant metabolism under stress conditions. The identification of the culturable bacteria revealed that most of these microbes belong to the genera Pseudomonas, Bacillus, and Acinetobacter. A total of 177 microbial strains were cultured, with molecular identification revealing 79 reductant, 86 non-reductant, and 12 uncultured strains. Among 162 samples screened for ACC deaminase activity, 50 tested positive. To further understand microbial dynamics, samples were collected from both natural sources and artificial pond reservoirs to assess the impact of the location on flood-associated microbiomes in submerged plants. Metagenomic analysis was conducted on both the epiphytic and endophytic samples. By exploring the overall composition and dynamics of microbial communities associated with submerged plants, this research seeks to deepen our understanding of plant–microbe interactions in aquatic environments. The microbial screening helped to identify the diverse microbes associated with ACC deaminase activity in submerged plants and amplicon sequencing analysis paved the way towards identifying the impact of the location in shaping the microbiome and the diversity associated with endophytic and epiphytic microbes. Co-occurrence network analysis further highlighted the intricate interactions within these microbial communities. Notably, ACC deaminase activity was observed in plant-associated microbes across different locations, with distinct variations between epiphytic and endophytic populations as identified through co-occurrence network analysis.
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Microbiome research: Application of “omics” technology
Microbiome research is a thriving field focused on characterizing the composition and functionality of microbial populations or microbiomes from a wide array of ecological niches. Microbiomes occupy living organisms, soil, the atmosphere, and bodies of water and exist in moderate and extreme climates. Understanding the intractable microbial universes in various environments is challenging and potentially rewarding to humankind. Historically, elucidating pathogenic microbes and their impact on host species has dominated microbiome-based studies. Moreover, a tiny percentage of microbes can be cultured using classical culturing methods. With advancements in high throughput experimentation and computational tools derived from microbial ecology, there is a driving force to gain insight into the entire microbial consortium from various environmental and biological locations. Metagenomics, the study of all the microbial genomes in a sample using sequencing techniques (e.g., 16s rRNA amplicon sequencing and shotgun sequencing), has so far dominated the types of investigations conducted in the field of microbiome research. More recently, however, researchers are becoming increasingly interested in better understanding the complex microbe-associated molecular network and specific protein and metabolite functions associated with microbial genetic potential. Metaproteomic, meta transcriptomics, and metabolomics are three potent methods to accumulate information about microbial proteins, messenger RNA, and metabolites in a microbial community. These methods are currently being applied in laboratory settings to address our general lack of understanding of microbe-microbe interactions and microbe-environment interactions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2205612
- PAR ID:
- 10436725
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Biomedical journal of scientific technical research
- Volume:
- 46
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2574-1241
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 37117-37122
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.26717/BJSTR.2022.46.007300
