Increased Fitness of Rice Plants to Abiotic Stress Via Habitat Adapted Symbiosis: A Strategy for Mitigating Impacts of Climate Change

Climate change and catastrophic events have contributed to rice shortages in several regions due to decreased water availability and soil salinization. Although not adapted to salt or drought stress, two commercial rice varieties achieved tolerance to these stresses by colonizing them with Class 2 fungal endophytes isolated from plants growing across moisture and salinity gradients

The great screen anomaly—a new frontier in product discovery through functional metagenomics

Functional metagenomics, the study of the collective genome of a microbial community by expressing it in a foreign host, is an emerging field in biotechnology. Over the past years, the possibility of novel product discovery through metagenomics has developed rapidly. Thus, metagenomics has been heralded as a promising mining strategy of resources for the biotechnological and pharmaceutical industry. However, in spite of innovative work in the field of functional genomics in recent years, yields from function-based metagenomics studies still fall short of producing significant amounts of new products that are valuable for biotechnological processes. Thus, a new set of strategies is required with respect to fostering gene expression in comparison to the traditional work. These new strategies should address a major issue, that is, how to successfully express a set of unknown genes of unknown origin in a foreign host in high throughput. This article is an opinionating review of functional metagenomic screening of natural microbial communities, with a focus on the optimization of new product discovery. It first summarizes current major bottlenecks in functional metagenomics and then provides an overview of the general metagenomic assessment strategies, with a focus on the challenges that are met in the screening for, and selection of, target genes in metagenomic libraries. To identify possible screening limitations, strategies to achieve optimal gene expression are reviewed, examining the molecular events all the way from the transcription level through to the secretion of the target gene product

Plants in aquatic ecosystems: current trends and future directions

Aquatic plants fulfil a wide range of ecological roles, and make a substantial contribution to the structure, function and service provision of aquatic ecosystems. Given their well-documented importance in aquatic ecosystems, research into aquatic plants continues to blossom. The 14th International Symposium on Aquatic Plants, held in Edinburgh in September 2015, brought together 120 delegates from 28 countries and six continents. This special issue of Hydrobiologia includes a select number of papers on aspects of aquatic plants, covering a wide range of species, systems and issues. In this paper we present an overview of current trends and future directions in aquatic plant research in the early 21st century. Our understanding of aquatic plant biology, the range of scientific issues being addressed and the range of techniques available to researchers have all arguably never been greater; however, substantial challenges exist to the conservation and management of both aquatic plants and the ecosystems in which they are found. The range of countries and continents represented by conference delegates and authors of papers in the special issue illustrate the global relevance of aquatic plant research in the early 21st century but also the many challenges that this burgeoning scientific discipline must address

Crassulacean acid metabolism in the context of other carbon-concentrating mechanisms in freshwater plants: a review

Inorganic carbon can be in short-supply in freshwater relative to that needed by freshwater plants for photosynthesis because of a large external transport limitation coupled with frequent depleted concentrations of CO2 and elevated concentrations of O2. Freshwater plants have evolved a host of avoidance, exploitation and amelioration strategies to cope with the low and variable supply of inorganic carbon in water. Avoidance strategies rely on the spatial variation in CO2 concentrations within and among lakes. Exploitation strategies involve anatomical and morphological features that take advantage of sources of CO2 outside of the water column such as the atmosphere or sediment. Amelioration strategies involve carbon concentrating mechanisms (CCM) based on uptake of bicarbonate, which is widespread, C4-fixation which is infrequent and Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM) which is of intermediate frequency. CAM enables aquatic plants to take up inorganic carbon in the night. Furthermore, daytime inorganic carbon uptake is generally not inhibited and therefore CAM is considered to be a carbon conserving mechanism. CAM in aquatic plants is a plastic mechanism regulated by environmental variables and is generally down-regulated when inorganic carbon does not limit photosynthesis. CAM is regulated in the long term (acclimation during growth), but is also affected by environmental conditions in the short term (response on a daily basis). In aquatic plants CAM appears to be an ecologically important mechanism for increasing inorganic carbon uptake, since the in situ contribution from CAM to the C-budget generally is high (18-55%)