Plant & Microbial Synthetic Biologist | Music Lover & Coffee Drinker | Assistant Professor University of Georgia Department of Plant Biology & Institute of Bioinformatics | https://www.dundaslab.com
Chris Dundas
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Thanks to all co-authors on this study, and special thanks to co-author @universityofga.bsky.social Prof. Jason Wallace's lab for assisting with microbiome profiling!
A single-cell screening platform accelerates functional genetics in plants - @sattelylab.bsky.social go.nature.com/4n8wzLv
We hope this offers a broadly extensible strategy for using bacterial synthetic biology as a phenotyping tool in plant science—there are 20+ years of bacterial biosensors ready to be repurposed for rhizosphere action!
Extending our biosensor system across plant species, we see higher sucrose exudation in eudicots, while monocots show generally lower levels along the root.
We also use these biosensors to phenotype engineered plant circuits that tune sucrose exudation—connecting plant synthetic biology to microbial readouts.
Lastly, we find pairing bacterial biosensors with exudate engineering and SynComs provides a practical framework to spatially resolve how exudation shapes rhizosphere community assembly.
Our biosensor platform enables live, fluorescence microscopy–based quantification of sucrose exudation, providing spatial resolution along roots and revealing low exudation at root tips and higher levels in mature tissues in Arabidopsis thaliana.
Current exudate measurements are largely bulk and miss fine-scale spatial patterns in the rhizosphere. Rhizobacterial biosensors may resolve this; we built sucrose-responsive circuits in Pseudomonas putida (Suc-MAPP) generating ratiometric fluorescence readouts to micromolar sucrose.
Suc-MAPP biosensors reveal strong links between root sucrose exudation and photoassimilate source–sink dynamics, including effects of photosynthetic input and sucrose metabolism, where invertases appear to strongly gate root tip sucrose release.
Excited to share our new preprint on rhizobacterial biosensors mapping sucrose exudation 🌱
Work spanning my TomKat postdoc in @josedinneny.bsky.social's lab to my own lab at @universityofga.bsky.social; co-first with my PhD student Gretchen Brinkman: 🧵
biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
