Sampling Root-Associated Microbiome Communities of Maize (Zea mays)

Alonso Favela; Sierra Raglin; Jason G Wallace

doi:10.1101/pdb.prot108580

Sampling Root-Associated Microbiome Communities of Maize (Zea mays)

Cold Spring Harb Protoc. 2024 Sep 5. doi: 10.1101/pdb.prot108580. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Alonso Favela¹, Sierra Raglin², Jason G Wallace^{3

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ School of Plant Sciences, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA [email protected] [email protected].
² Carl Woese Institute of Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA [email protected] [email protected].
³ Center for Applied Genetic Technologies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA.
⁴ Department of Crop and Soil Science, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA.
⁵ Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Genomics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA.

PMID: 39237450
DOI: 10.1101/pdb.prot108580

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.