Wonderful to see this beautiful image on the cover of Science this week highlighting a paper that uses high resolution imaging to show the spatial patterns of bacterial attraction to glutamine from roots.
Paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Perspective here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Localized glutamine leakage drives the spatial structure of root microbial colonization Plant roots release exudates to encourage microbiome assembly, which influences the function and stress resilience of plants. How specific exudates drive spatial colonization patterns remains largely ...

A long road to the Cover of Science!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’m deeply pleased that we have been able to bring this work to fruition together and present it in Science Magazine. Thank you for the incredible support and collaboration over these past five years. Without each of your contributions, none of this would have been possible.

Niko and I initially speculated that the defective barrier allowed sugars or mineral nutrients like potassium to leak from the central vascular tissue of roots. It was a complete surprise when Yuanjie Tang and hueihsuantsai.bsky.social later identified the key attractant as glutamine.

This discovery traces back to the spring of 2018, when I was a postdoc in nikogeldner.bsky.social 's lab. After shifting Arabidopsis seedlings from solid to liquid culture, I observed that the root commensal bacterium CHA0 rapidly colonized Casparian strip–defective mutants.