Graduation Year
2022
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree
Master of Science
Program
Biological Science
Program Director
Meredith Protas, PhD
First Reader
Shayin Gottlieb, PhD
Second Reader
Bridget Hansen, PhD
Abstract
Diazotrophs increase plant productivity by providing ammonia directly to plants in the rhizosphere or through association with the roots (Sun et al., 2021). Leveraging diazotrophs can aid in the reduction or application of harmful synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. This thesis aims to use plant root proteins, or lectins, to more rapidly recover viable diazotrophs that are likely to associate with crops. In this study, lectins, are used to recover bacteria from bulk soil by taking advantage of the binding relationship between lectins and bacterial cell surface polysaccharides. When commercially-available lectins were used with a magnetic pulldown to separate the lectin, bacterial complex from soil, a different community of bacteria was selected in comparison to the native soil population. The lectin assay recovered species from Classes known to contain diazotrophs and other nutrient cyclers such as: Actinobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria, Bacilli, Betaproteobacteria, Chloroflexia, Cytophagia, Deltaproteobacteria, Gammapoteobacteria, and Sphingobacteriia.
Included in
Agricultural Science Commons, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Commons, Biology Commons, Microbiology Commons, Molecular Biology Commons