High nitrogen-induced changes in rhizosphere microbial community structure can modulate disease susceptibility to the rice blast.
Roy M, Shanmugam G, Park S, Bae H, Choi K
Soil Health
Same over-fertilizing habits that gardeners and farmers use to grow bigger, greener plants may be quietly disabling the plant's immune system by disrupting the beneficial microbes in the soil — meaning you could be making your garden more disease-prone every time you reach for the fertilizer bag.
Scientists discovered that when rice plants are given too much nitrogen fertilizer, the community of tiny microbes living in the soil around their roots changes dramatically — and not for the better. These altered microbes seem to turn down the plant's natural defenses, leaving it wide open to attack from a fungus that causes rice blast, one of the most destructive rice diseases in the world. Even more striking, when researchers transplanted this 'disrupted' soil microbe community into healthy plants growing in normal conditions, those plants also became more susceptible — showing that the damage to the soil community can outlast the fertilizer itself.
Key Findings
High nitrogen fertilizer significantly reshaped both bacterial and fungal communities in the root-zone soil and suppressed key plant immune genes, including OsPAL06 and OsPR10b.
Network analysis showed that high nitrogen plus fungal infection caused a measurable loss of microbial connectivity and the disappearance of 'keystone' microbial species that normally help stabilize the community.
Transplanting root-zone microbiome samples from high-nitrogen, infected donor plants into healthy standard-nitrogen recipient plants successfully reproduced increased disease susceptibility — proving the microbiome itself carries and transfers the effect.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Too much nitrogen fertilizer doesn't just feed rice plants — it reshapes the microscopic community of bacteria and fungi living around the roots in ways that make the plant more vulnerable to a devastating fungal disease called rice blast. The root-zone microbiome, not just the nitrogen itself, appears to be a key driver of this increased susceptibility.
Abstract Preview
Nitrogen-induced susceptibility (NIS) in rice, where excess nitrogen (N) enhances vulnerability to Magnaporthe oryzae, has been observed but remains mechanistically unclear. Here, we demonstrate th...
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