Metatranscriptomic Studies of the Plant Rhizosphere for Finding Biological Agents

Soilborne diseases are accountable for most important crop losses globally. There are two ways to control this ailment. The judicious use of synthetic agrochemicals harms ecosystem and beneficial soil microbes and alternatively promotes the use of biological agents to control plant pathogens. Rhizospheric beneficial microbes play a crucial role in disease suppression process in the soil ecosystems by guarding plants from infections that they likely get from soilborne pathogens. The microorganisms and mechanisms involved in the disease suppression in soils are poorly known till date. Therefore, development of meta-omics techniques would provide deeper understanding of this association. Metatranscriptomics, a study of the total content of gene transcripts (RNA copies of the genes) in a microbial community, is a right approach to unveil the role of genes responsible for the disease suppression mechanism at molecular level as this technique is considered as a unique entity at a specific moment of sampling. This technique is applied to obtain the whole expression profile in a community and to follow the dynamics of gene expression patterns over time and/or various environmental parameters. The microbial communities in several environments have been extensively studied to reveal their roles in plant-microbes interaction and disease suppression in rhizospheric soils.