Uncovering microbial mechanisms to improve duckweed growth from biofuel/bioproduct production and nutrient cycling in aquatic envitonments
EMSL Project ID
49830
Abstract
While several mechanisms utilized by beneficial microbes associated with terrestrial plants have been characterized, less is known about how microbes affect aquatic plant growth. We hypothesized that such beneficial relationships also exist for aquatic plants in the family Lemnaceae, commonly known as duckweeds. Duckweed is the fastest growing flowering plant, and holds potential to be used for phytoremediation of wastewater by extracting carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Further, duckweed is easily harvested, and can be used as biomass for biofuel production. However, realizing this fast-growth potential, and making it economically viable now and into the future depends on our ability to create a reliable biomass production pipeline through a knowledge-based approach. The studies proposed here would define the role for the microbiome to increase duckweed biomass and extract various nutrients from its aquatic environment. For these studies, we have a set of duckweed growth-promoting bacterial isolates for identification of the targeted host pathways resulting in plant growth. In our previous studies, we performed massive parallel sequencing of duckweed grown in water from a municipal wastewater treatment plant, as well as water controls to characterize the assembly of duckweed microbiomes from their aquatic environment. Further, we tested selected strains of microbes from duckweed on growth of a model land-plant Arabidopsis thaliana to reveal conserved pathways of growth promotion, including bacterial production of auxin. Here we propose studies to dissect the duckweed specific mechanisms from those shared with A. thaliana. The facilities at EMSL will allow us to determine if our set of duckweed growth promoting bacteria are actually endophytes, identify the microbial and plant pathways associated with their interaction, and characterize the altered chemical composition of duckweed tissue and their aquatic environmentThese studies in duckweed will set the stage for deployment of defined microbial amendments to optimize farming of these aquatic plants for renewable biomass production.Project Details
Project type
Large-Scale EMSL Research
Start Date
2017-10-01
End Date
2019-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigator(s)
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