Location: Plant Gene Expression Center
2022 Annual Report
Accomplishments
1. Identification of microbial lineages that support crop fitness under drought stress. Drought represents a significant negative determinant of crop yields and health each year, and the severity and duration of drought is anticipated to increase across the country in the coming decades. In addition to ongoing efforts to improve drought tolerance through breeding and crop engineering, there is a major need for alternative methods to mitigate drought stress in crops. ARS researchers in Albany, California, identified specific root-associated microbes and microbial synthetic communities that can alter root and shoot traits in sorghum and other grass crops under drought stress. These microbes include known nitrogen-fixing and drought-enriched lineages. This discovery paves the way for the development of technologies to support crop productivity under abiotic stress.
Review Publications
Tang, J., Wu, D., Li, X., Wang, L., Xu, L., Zhang, Y., Xu, F., Liu, H., Xie, Q., Dai, S., Coleman-Derr, D.A., Yu, F. 2022. Plant immunity suppression via PHR1-RALF-FERONIA shapes the root microbiome to alleviate phosphate starvation. EMBO Journal. 41(6). Article e109102. https://doi.org/10.15252/embj.2021109102.
Mishra, L., Mishra, S., Caddell, D.F., Coleman-Derr, D.A., Funk, C. 2021. The plastid-localized AtFtsHi3 pseudo-protease of Arabidopsis thaliana has an impact on plant growth and drought tolerance. Frontiers in Plant Science. 12. Article 694727. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2021.694727.
Berliner, A., Hilzinger, A., Abel, A., McNulty, M., Makrygiorgos, G., Averesch, N., Gupta, S., Benvenuti, A., Caddell, A., Coleman-Derr, D.A., et al. 2021. Towards a biomanufactory on Mars. Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences. 8. Article 711550. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2021.711550.
Willing, C., Pierroz, G., Guzman, A., Anderegg, L., Gao, C., Coleman-Derr, D.A., Taylor, J., Bruns, T., Dawson, T. 2021. Keep your friends close: Host compartmentalisation of microbial communities facilitates decoupling from effects of habitat fragmentation. Ecology Letters. 24(12):2674–2686. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13886.
Gao, C., Courty, P., Varoquaux, N., Cole, B., Montoya, L., Xu, L., Purdom, E., Vogel, J., Hutmacher, R., Dahlberg, J., Coleman-Derr, D.A., Lemaux, P., Taylor, J. 2022. Successional adaptive strategies revealed by correlating arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal abundance with host plant gene expression. Molecular Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.16343.
Cole, B., Bergmann, D., Blaby-Haas, C., Blaby, I., Bouchard, K., Brady, S., Ciobanu, D., Coleman-Derr, D.A., Leiboff, S., Mortimer, J., Nobori, T., Rhee, S., Schmutz, J., Simmons, B., Singh, A., Sinha, N., Vogel, J., O'Malley, R., Visel, A., Dickel, D. 2021. Plant single-cell solutions for energy and the environment. Communications Biology. 4. Article 962. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02477-4.
Gao, C., Xu, L., Montoya, L., Madera, M., Hollingsworth, J., Chen, L., Purdom, E., Singan, V., Vogel, J., Hutmacher, R., Dahlberg, J., Coleman-Derr, D.A., Lemaux, P., Taylor, J. 2022. Co-occurrence networks reveal more complexity than community composition in resistance and resilience of microbial communities. Nature Communications. 13. Article 3867. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31343-y.
Deng, S., Meier, M., Caddell, D., Yang, J., Coleman-Derr, D.A. 2022. Plant microbiome-based genome-wide association studies. In: Torkamaneh, D., Belzile, F., editors. Genome-Wide Association Studies. Methods in Molecular Biology. New York, NY: Humana. p. 353-367. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2237-7_20.
