Published by Oxford University Press [2005] on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology.
FOCUS PAPER |
Preface to Below Ground Processes
The Focus Section in this issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany (JXB) contains four invited papers from a session held at the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) Annual Meeting in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2005 addressing aspects of Below Ground Processes. These papers primarily describe the consequences of interactions between plant roots and microbes in the rhizosphere. Alun Morgan (Warwick HRI) and colleagues have provided an introduction to the organisms present in the rhizosphere, the biological processes to which they contribute, and their consequences, in terms of costs and benefits, for a plant. They note two cost-effective symbioses for the plant. The first, between mycorrhizal fungi and plants, was fundamental to the colonization of the land. The second, the symbiosis between N2-fixing strains of Rhizobium and Frankia and members of the angiosperm Rosid I clade, enables plants to grow on N-poor soils. Following this, Antonio Márquez (Seville) and colleagues review the assimilation of nitrate by the model legume, Lotus japonicus. This plant can be cultivated readily in the laboratory and is amenable to all the techniques of modern molecular biology. It is especially suited to studies of functional genomics, and Márquez et al. have described the isolation and characterization of mutants lacking nitrate uptake and glutamine synthetase activities that illustrate the roles of these processes in N assimilation. David Johnson (Aberdeen) and colleagues describe the mycorrhizal fungi of boreal forests and temperate grasslands. They discuss the specificity of associations between plants and AM-fungi, which range from the specific to the promiscuous, and its consequences for ecosystem species diversity. They conclude that not only does the plant community regulate the structure and function of the mycorrhizal community, but that the mycorrhizal community can also affect plant species richness. Finally, José-Miguel Barea (Granada) and colleagues review the diversity of microbes, their interactions, and their functions within the rhizosphere. They describe the benefits of fostering specific microbial communities in the rhizosphere and how co-operative microbial activities can be used to improve the stability and productivity of both agricultural and natural ecosystems.
We thank the SEB, the SEB-Plant Transport Group, and JXB for their financial support of the session in Barcelona on Below Ground Processes, the authors for their contributions, and all the staff at JXB for their patience and support during the production of this Focus Section.
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