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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Abiotic Stress
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1484251

A multi-omics approach to unravel the interaction between heat and drought stress in the Arabidopsis thaliana holobiont

Provisionally accepted
Steffen Kolb Steffen Kolb 1*Biancamaria Senizza Biancamaria Senizza 2Fabrizio Araniti Fabrizio Araniti 3Simon Lewin Simon Lewin 4Sonja Wende Sonja Wende 4Luigi Lucini Luigi Lucini 2
  • 1 Institute of Landscape Biogeochemistry, Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg, Brandenburg, Germany
  • 2 Department for Sustainable Food Process, CRAST Research Centre, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Piacenza, Italy, Milano, Italy
  • 3 Dipartimento di Scienze agrarie e ambientali, Produzione, Territorio, Agroenergia (Di.S.A.A.) Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy, Milano, Italy
  • 4 Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The impact of combined heat and drought stress was investigated in Arabidopsis thaliana and compared to individual stresses to reveal additive effects and interactions. A combination of plant metabolomics and root and rhizosphere bacterial metabarcoding were used to unravel effects at the plant holobiont level.Hierarchical cluster analysis of metabolomics signatures pointed out two main clusters, one including heat and combined heat and drought, and the second cluster that included the control and drought treatments. Overall, phenylpropanoids and nitrogen-containing compounds, hormones and amino acids showed the highest discriminant potential. A decrease in alpha-diversity of Bacteria was observed upon stress, with stress-dependent differences in bacterial microbiota composition. The shift in betadiversity highlighted the pivotal enrichment of Proteobacteria, including Rhizobiales, Enterobacteriales and Azospirillales.The results corroborate the concept of stress interaction, where the combined heat and drought stress is not the mere combination of the single stresses. Intriguingly, multi-omics interpretations evidenced a good correlation between root metabolomics and root bacterial microbiota, indicating an orchestrated modulation of the whole holobiont.

    Keywords: heat stress1, Drought2, multi-omics3, Phytohormones4, Proteobacteria5, Rhizobiales6

    Received: 21 Aug 2024; Accepted: 28 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kolb, Senizza, Araniti, Lewin, Wende and Lucini. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Steffen Kolb, Institute of Landscape Biogeochemistry, Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg, 15374, Brandenburg, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.