Soil is crowded with bacteria and fungi. Tens of thousands of different species can inhabit the same space. So how does a plant that grows amid it all know the difference between good bacteria and bad ones?
The defense hormone salicylic acid helps select which bacteria live both inside and on the surface of a plant’s roots, keeping some families out and actively recruiting others.
“What we really wanted to understand was how the plant establishes a mutualistic relationship with microbes that it likes, compared to microbes that it doesn’t like,” said Jeffery Dangl, professor of biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a HHMI-Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator who led the research.
