Publications by authors named "C Pieterse"
Potato vigour, the growth potential of seed potatoes, is a key agronomic trait that varies significantly across production fields due to factors such as genetic background and environmental conditions. Seed tuber microbiomes are thought to influence plant health and crop performance, yet the precise relationships between microbiome composition and potato vigour remain unclear. Here we conducted microbiome sequencing on seed tuber eyes and heel ends from 6 potato varieties grown in 240 fields.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Potato cultivation in Ecuador's Andes, particularly the Superchola cultivar, accounts for 60% of the country's potato production, with significant observations made from November 2022 to January 2023 related to stem lesions on these plants.
- An investigation of symptomatic plants led to the isolation of 14 bacterial strains, with one (M3) identified as pathogenic, causing lesions on potato tubers and stems.
- Pathogenicity tests confirmed that only isolate M3 induced disease symptoms in healthy potato plants using specific inoculation techniques.
The plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) regulates essential processes in plant development and responsiveness to abiotic and biotic stresses. ABA perception triggers a post-translational signaling cascade that elicits the ABA gene regulatory network (GRN), encompassing hundreds of transcription factors (TFs) and thousands of transcribed genes. To further our knowledge of this GRN, we performed an RNA-seq time series experiment consisting of 14 time points in the 16 h following a one-time ABA treatment of 5-week-old Arabidopsis rosettes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlants have coevolved together with the microbes that surround them and this assemblage of host and microbes functions as a discrete ecological unit called a holobiont. This review outlines plant-driven assembly of disease-suppressive microbiomes. Plants are colonized by microbes from seed, soil, and air but selectively shape the microbiome with root exudates, creating microenvironment hot spots where microbes thrive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Potato seed tubers carry soil-borne microbes that can impact the following season's plants, and this study explored how these microbial communities are passed from seed tubers to the new plants.
- Researchers found that the production field and potato genotype significantly influenced the microbiome's composition, which remained distinguishable even after winter storage, although there was minimal vertical transmission of field-specific microbes (less than 0.2%) to the new plants.
- The study concluded that the original microbiome of seed tubers plays a critical role in the health of subsequent plants, indicating that these microbial communities deserve more attention in agricultural practices.