Multi-disciplinary approaches for studying rhizobium – legume symbioses

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1 Department of Biology, University of Florence, Sesto Fiorentino, Florence, Italy
2 Department of Biology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
3 Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27033v1
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
diCenzo GC, Zamani M, Checcucci A, Fondi M, Griffitts JS, Finan TM, Mengoni A. 2018. Multi-disciplinary approaches for studying rhizobium – legume symbioses. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27033v1

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 emphasize 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.

Supplemental Information

File S1. Contains the supplementary methods and associated references, and Figure S1

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.27033v1/supp-1

File S2.Contains an enlarged version of the phylogeny of Figure 1, the Newick formatted phylogeny and associated annotation file of Figure 1, and a README file to describe the contents of the archive

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.27033v1/supp-2