<i>In vitro</i> biofilm formation by a beneficial bacterium partially predicts <i>in planta</i> protection against rhizosphere pathogens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plant roots form associations with beneficial and pathogenic soil microorganisms. Although members of the rhizosphere microbiome can protect against pathogens, the mechanisms are poorly understood. We hypothesized that the ability to form a biofilm on the root surface is necessary for the exclusion of pathogens; however, it is not known if the same biofilm formation components required in vitro are necessary in vivo. Pseudomonas brassicacearum WCS365 is a beneficial strain that is phylogenetically closely related to an opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas sp. N2C3 and confers protection against N2C3 in the rhizosphere. We used this plant-mutualist-pathogen model to screen collections of P. brassicacearum WCS365 increased attachment mutants (iam) and surface attachment defective (sad) transposon insertion mutants that form increased or decreased biofilm on abiotic surfaces, respectively. We found that whereas the P. brassicacearum WCS365 mutants had altered biofilm formation in vitro, only a subset of these mutants lost protection against N2C3. Non-protective mutants those involved in large adhesion protein (Lap) biosynthesis, flagellar synthesis and function, and O-antigen biosynthesis. We found that the inability of P. brassicacearum WCS365 mutants to grow in planta, and the inability to suppress pathogen growth, both partially contributed to loss of plant protection. We did not find a correlation between the extent of biofilm formed in vitro and pathogen protection in planta indicating that biofilm formation on abiotic surfaces may not fully predict pathogen exclusion in planta. Collectively, our work provides insights into mechanisms of biofilm formation and host colonization that shape the outcomes of host-microbe-pathogen interactions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".