Plenary Keynote: Sarah Lebeis
Talk title: “Untangling Microbial Complexity to Reveal Drivers of Root Microbiome Assembly and Function”
Talk abstract: Plant microbiomes are critical for promoting resilience to environmental stress and supporting plant growth and development. The mechanisms that dictate assembly and function of these microbial communities remain largely enigmatic. The Lebeis lab aims to identify specific plant and microbial factors mediating plant-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions at the root-soil interface critical for root microbiome establishment across broad plant hosts. We use a spectrum of microbial community complexities, from single strains to natural microbiomes, to gain both mechanistic and holistic understanding of how individual phenotypes scale-up to higher-order community dynamics. We combine characterized bacterial strains into synthetic communities (SynComs) to systematically distinguish plant from microbial influence over microbiome composition trajectories. This approach allowed us to find that individual bacterial strains have distinct phenotypes in plant roots with different salicylic acid and coumarin biosynthesis potential. We employed another experimental approach to serially passage microbial communities from field soil in roots to enhance the impact of plant genotype over microbiome composition to enrich for novel beneficial and pathogenic bacterial strains. Finally, we also combined information from a large-scale metatranscriptomic dataset from natural poplar trees and experimental genetic manipulation assays in Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings to converge on a conserved role for transport of the plant metabolite myo-inositol in mediating host-microbe interactions. Our data suggests host control of this compound and resulting microbial behavior are important mechanisms at play surrounding the host metabolite myo-inositol, especially during drought stress. Together, these studies reveal that common root exudates play distinct roles in root microbiome assembly and subsequently influence varying microbiome functioning across diverse plant hosts.
Bio: Sarah Lebeis broad training in microbiology and immunology using metagenomics to elucidate the relationships between hosts and their microbial communities. She received her B.S. from Lyman Briggs School at Michigan State University with a major in Biology. Her Ph.D. was earned at Emory University in Microbiology and Molecular Biology. Her postdoctoral studies in Jeff Dangl’s lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill were supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Seedling Postdoctoral Innovators in Research and Education (SPIRE) program. She began her independent research program at the University of Tennessee in 2014, where she was an assistant professor in the Microbiology Department and was awarded an NSF-CAREER Award. In 2020, she moved her research program to Michigan State University with a joint appointment in the Departments of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences and Microbiology, Genetics, & Immunology. She is also a member of MSU’s Plant Resilience Institute and a Team Lead for the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Research in the Lebeis lab aims to uncover mechanisms of plant influence over microbiome composition, critical microbe-microbe interactions within communities, and microbial-mediated plant growth promotion, which ultimately influence plant health and resilience.
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