Student/presenter: Leonidas D'Agostino, MS student, Plant and Soil Science
Format: Oral presentation
Title: Understanding the Dynamics of Soybean Root Nodule Development Using Single Cell Transcriptome Technology
Leonidas D'Agostino, Lenin Yong-Villalobos, Luis Herrera-Estrella and Gunvant B. Patil
Institute of Genomics for Crop Abiotic Stress Tolerance (IGCAST), Department of Plant & Soil Science, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
Beneficial microbes, especially rhizobium, offer a sustainable solution for improving nutrient uptake in legume crops and the research community understands a substantial amount about the processes involved in nitrogen fixation in legumes. Root nodules are exogenous organs formed through the symbiotic relationship between legume plants and the bacterial group rhizobium. Once formed, these nodules fix atmospheric nitrogen into usable ammonia for the plant, essentially replacing the need for nitrogen fertilizer application. However, the complexity of signal reception, metabolic-flux, nodule development, N-fixation, and nutrient uptake at the ‘sub-cellular level' is elusive and not investigated in soybean or any other legume. In this project, we aim to capture the temporal and subcellular expression differences in relation to the nodule's growth stages (immature, mature, post-maturity) through a process known as single-cell transcriptomics. To do so, soybean genotype (Williams 82, reference genome) is inoculated with rhizobia to induce nodulation. Nodules are then collected at three stages and nuclei are extracted. These nuclei are processed through the 10X genomics single cell pipeline in order to generate a barcoded library made up of the individual cells. The transcriptional map generated from this data will help us to understand the dynamics of the gene-regulatory network and nitrogen fixation processes at a single cell level. On a larger scale, this project will provide in-depth understanding of symbiosis between rhizobium and soybean and will provide sustainable solutions to improve nutrient uptake in soybean and other legumes.