Wheat seeds may pass helpful bacteria to the next generation
Sanz-Puente I, Abdelfattah A, Robledo M
Seed Saving
If the beneficial bacteria living on a seed packet in your shed get passed down plant to plant, saving your own seed each year could mean saving a living support crew along with the genetics.
Plants can't put microbes into their DNA, so scientists have long wondered how helpful bacteria and fungi manage to show up generation after generation. This review looked at wheat seeds and found that certain bacteria, especially one group called Pantoea, keep turning up inside seeds across many separate studies and even seem to ride along from a plant to its offspring. That suggests seeds aren't just packets of genetic instructions, they're also tiny microbial time capsules that help start the next generation off with a built-in team of beneficial partners.
Key Findings
A 'meta-core' of bacterial taxa repeatedly detected in wheat seeds across independent studies was proposed as a candidate universal seed microbiome.
Pantoea bacteria showed the strongest evidence of persisting within a single generation and transferring across multiple generations via seed.
Wheat domestication and host genetics appear to have shaped which microbes seeds carry, implicating maternal, floral, and pollen-mediated transmission routes.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists reviewing wheat research found evidence that seeds carry beneficial bacteria from parent plant to offspring, suggesting crops may inherit helpful microbes much like they inherit genes.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
The Wheat Seed Microbiome as a Model for Understanding the Transmission of Beneficial Plant-Associated Bacteria.
Beneficial plant-microbe interactions are fundamental to plant nutrition, growth, stress tolerance and disease resistance. However, because microorganisms are not encoded by the plant genome, the m...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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Wheat is a group of wild and domesticated grasses of the genus Triticum. As cereals, they are cultivated for their grains, which are staple foods around the world. Well-known wheat species and hybrids include the most widely grown common wheat, spelt, durum, emmer, einkorn, and Khorasan or Kamut....