(22f) Tools & Methods for Engineering Colonization of Plant Microbiomes

Enhancing crop production is a necessity with increasing demand for staple crops and utilization of carbon/nitrogen. Plant-associated microbiomes offers one avenue for addressing this demand. While large advancements have been gained recently due to advancements in high-throughput technology, building enhanced or new functionality into existing microbiomes has remained a challenge due to sparse materials and methods along with poor colonization of the desired trait. In the work discussed here, we detail the development of genetic tools and utilization of these tools for elucidating colonization factors into the Maize microbiome using a model synthetic community (SynCom). Utilizing this simple yet representative SynCom, we have been able to develop highly efficient and standard transformation methods along with standardized genetic expression and transformation vectors. Furthermore, we show how these standardized tools and methods can be used to rapidly characterize endogenous promoter sequences and identify functions to enhance member colonization of the plant host.