Back to the future: Using herbarium specimens to isolate nodule-associated bacteria.

ABSTRACT: Herbarium specimens are increasingly being used as sources of information to understand the ecology and evolution of plants and their associated microbes. Most studies have used specimens as a source of genetic material using culture-independent approaches. We demonstrate that herbarium specimens can also be used to culture nodule-associated bacteria, opening the possibility of using specimens to understand plant-microbe interactions at new spatiotemporal scales. We used historic and contemporary nodules of a common legume, Medicago lupulina, to create a culture collection. We were able to recover historic bacteria in 15 genera from three specimens (collected in 1950, 2004, and 2015). This work is the first of its kind to isolate historic bacteria from herbarium specimens. Future wo

SUBMITTER: Petipas RH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11246978 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature