Multi-disciplinary approaches for studying rhizobium – legume symbioses
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Computational Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Microbiology, Synthetic Biology
- Keywords
- symbiosis, multi-omics, systems biology, Rhizobia, nitrogen fixation
- Copyright
- © 2018 diCenzo et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Multi-disciplinary approaches for studying rhizobium – legume symbioses. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27033v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27033v2
Abstract
The rhizobium-legume symbiosis is a major source of fixed nitrogen (ammonia) in the biosphere. The potential for this process to increase agricultural yield while reducing the reliance on nitrogen-based fertilizers has generated interest in understanding and manipulating this process. For decades, rhizobium research has benefited from the use of leading techniques from a very broad set of fields, including population genetics, molecular genetics, genomics, and systems biology. In this review, we summarize many of the research strategies that have been employed in the study of rhizobia and the unique knowledge gained from these diverse tools, with a focus on genome and systems-level approaches. We then describe ongoing synthetic biology approaches aimed at improving existing symbioses or engineering completely new symbiotic interactions. The review concludes with our perspective of the future directions and challenges of the field, with an emphasis on how the application of a multi-disciplinary approach and the development of new methods will be necessary to ensure successful biotechnological manipulation of the symbiosis.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. A few typos have been fixed and table 1 has been expanded with two additional studies.