Scientist G and Dean, Academic Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology Trivandrum, Kerala, India
Body of Abstract: The rhizosphere and endosphere microbial population dynamics, both structural and functional, is under manipulative influence by the plants mediated via varying factors such as root exudation pattern, edaphic changes, growth stages and presence of various stressors. The estimates prove that only a meagre fraction of the microbial diversity comes under culturable populations. So, to unveil the structural and functional diversity of the entire bacterial community, we must resort to next generation sequencing techniques. With the advent of next generation sequencing and advanced bioinformatics, metagenomics has become a powerful tool to study the composition, structure, and diversity of rhizospheric and root endospheric bacterial communities. Here, in our study we aim to map and compare the bacterial community profile in the Phytophthora foot rot susceptible (Piper nigrum L.) and wild resistant cultivar (Piper colubrinum) of pepper. This will enable us to see whether the bacterial community colonizing the rhizosphere and endosphere have any role in imparting resistance to the resistant pepper cultivars. With this background, we hypothesize that the plant genotype i.e., resistant, or susceptible, has a profound influence on the rhizosphere and endosphere microbiome and it reshapes the microbial communities to impart plant disease resistance mainly to soil borne diseases like the Phytophthora foot rot.