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Book of Abstracts First Legume Society Conference 2013: A Legume Odyssey Novi Sad, Serbia, 9-11 May 2013
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Mutually beneficial multi-component plant-microbe systems of legumes and their
potential for plant production
Oksana Y Shtark, Vladimir A Zhukov, Alexey Y Borisov, Igor A Tikhonovich
All-Russia Research Institute for Agricultural Microbiology, St.-Petersburg, Russia
Legumes develop different mutually beneficial symbioses with soil microbes, such as arbuscular
mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, nodule bacteria and plant growth promoting bacteria. Symbioses supply
the plants with nutrients (predominantly with nitrogen and phosphorus), protect them from
pathogens and abiotic stresses and improve soil microbial biodiversity and fertility. The
synergistic activity of beneficial soil microbes (BSM) on the plants has great importance for the
use of multi-component symbiotic systems in low-input sustainable environmentally-friendly
agrotechnologies. However, the complex nature of the AM symbiosis when in a multicomponent
symbiosis (plant-fungus-bacteria) creates complications for the fungus to produce
AM fungal propagules and poses questions (a) about the effectiveness of the fungus per se in
interactions with the plants, without associates, and (b) about the necessity of using sterile/axenic
conditions for the production of the AM fungi based inoculants because of any mixing and
competition by microbes from the inoculants with the local soil microbial consortia. The legume
genes controlling interactions with BSM (including genes responsible for effectiveness of such
interactions) should be considered as a united genetic system. The plant genome is more stable
than that of microbes and therefore crop plants should select beneficial microbes and control the
effectiveness of the whole plant-microbe system in the field for the benefit of the crop and
therefore of human beings. There is clearly a need to breed legume crops with improved
performance under sustainable conditions involving interactions with BSM and optimising the
use of agrochemicals.
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