The first step to understanding the zone of interaction between plants' roots and microbes is to simplify it
. The advantage to its members of this triple alliance is that, acting together, the three organisms create a biofilm which can move about as a single entity. This presumably assists their feeding by allowing them to travel collectively to pastures new. None of this information would have emerged by studying the organisms in isolation, or even by pairwise comparison.
One of these optimists is Kirsten Hofmockel of the Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington. She has created simplified microbe communities by selecting for those dependent ultimately on a single food stuff. She started with chitin, the second most abundant carbohydrate polymer after cellulose. She mixed this material with sterile soil and then added an inoculum of organisms from natural soil, to see what survived.
Dr Hofmockel’s simplified communities are a step forward because they provide a basis for standardisation. This allows experiments to be repeated in different laboratories and the results compared meaningfully. Standard organisms make it easier for researchers to build on each others’ work. This is why fruit flies, small nematode worms, cress plants and mice are used so often in biology labs.
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