Sampling Root-Associated Microbiome Communities of Maize (Zea mays)
- 1School of Plant Sciences, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
- 2Carl Woese Institute of Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
- 3Center for Applied Genetic Technologies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA
- 4Department of Crop and Soil Science, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA
- 5Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Genomics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA
- ↵6Correspondence: alonsof{at}arizona.edu, sraglin2{at}illinois.edu
Abstract
The soil microbiome of maize shapes its fitness, sustainability, and productivity. Accurately sampling maize's belowground microbial communities is important for identifying and characterizing these functions. Here, we describe a protocol to sample the maize rhizosphere (including the rhizoplane and endorhizosphere) and root zone (still influential but further from the root) in a form suitable for downstream analyses like culturing and DNA extractions. Although this protocol is written with Zea mays as the focus, these methods can generally be applied to any plant with similar fibrous root systems.
Footnotes
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From the Maize collection, edited by Candice N. Hirsch and Marna D. Yandeau-Nelson. The entire Maize collection is available online at Cold Spring Harbor Protocols and can be accessed at https://cshprotocols.cshlp.org/.
