Legacy Results of Soil Microbes Assist Crops Survive

A brand new examine appearing in Nature Microbiology analyzes soils sampled throughout the state of Kansas to find out the significance of “legacy effects” — or how soils from a selected location are influenced by microbes which have advanced in response to the precise local weather at that web site for a few years.

“The bacteria and fungi and other organisms living in the soil can actually end up having important effects on things that matter, like carbon sequestration, nutrient movement and what we’re particularly interested in — the legacy effects on plants,” stated co-author Maggie Wagner, affiliate professor of ecology & evolutionary biology on the University of Kansas and affiliate scientist on the Kansas Biological Survey and Center for Ecological Research.

“We got interested in this because other researchers, for years, have been describing this type of ecological memory of soil microbes having some way to remember from their ancestors’ past,” she stated. “We thought this was really fascinating. It has a lot of important implications for how we can grow plants, including things like corn and wheat. Precipitation itself has a big influence on how plants grow, but also the memory of the microbes living in those soils could also play a role.”

According to Wagner, whereas legacy results beforehand have been reported, they aren’t effectively characterised. A greater understanding may ultimately profit farmers and agricultural biotech corporations, which may construct on the analysis.

“We don’t really understand how legacy effects work,” she stated. “Like, which microbes are involved at the genetic level, and how does that work? Which bacterial genes are being influenced? We also don’t understand how that legacy of climate moves through the soil to the microbes, and then eventually to the plant.”

By sampling soils from six websites throughout Kansas — from its decrease, rainier jap half to the state’s western High Plains, greater in altitude and drier due to the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains — the researchers aimed to find out variations in legacy results.

“This was a collaboration with a team at the University of Nottingham in England,” Wagner stated. “We divided up the work, but the bulk of the experiment — actually, the entire experiment — was conducted here at KU, and we also focused on soils from Kansas for this work.”

Back at KU, Wagner and her colleagues started testing the soils to higher perceive legacy results of the samples’ microbes.

“We used a kind of old-school technique, treating the microbes as a black box,” she stated. “We grew the plant in different microbial communities with different drought memories and then measured plants’ performance to understand what was beneficial and what was not.”

The researchers challenged the microbial communities for 5 months, both with loads of water or little or no water.

“Even after many thousands of bacterial generations, the memory of drought was still detectable,” Wagner stated. “One of the most interesting aspects we saw is that the microbial legacy effect was much stronger with plants that were native to those exact locales than plants that were from elsewhere and planted for agricultural reasons but weren’t native.”

While extra plant species will should be examined to verify this speculation — the researchers examined one crop (corn) and one native plant (gamagrass) — the researchers stated the findings may supply essential context for farmers who need to use useful microbes to enhance yields.

“We think it has something to do with the co-evolutionary history of those plants, meaning that over very long periods, gamagrass has been living with these exact microbial communities, but corn has not,” she stated. “Corn was domesticated in Central America and has only been in this area for a few thousand years.”

Additionally, the analysis staff carried out genetic evaluation on each microbes and vegetation to higher perceive on the molecular degree how legacy results may perform.

“The gene that excited us most was called nicotianamine synthase,” Wagner stated. “It produces a molecule mainly useful for plants to acquire iron from the soil but has also been recorded to influence drought tolerance in some species. In our analysis, the plant expressed this gene under drought conditions, but only when grown with microbes with a memory of dry conditions. The plant’s response to drought depended on the memory of the microbes, which we found fascinating.”

The KU researcher stated gamagrass is being checked out as a potential supply of genes to enhance corn efficiency below difficult situations.

“The gene I mentioned earlier could be of interest,” she stated. “For biotech firms focused on microbial additions to crops, this gives hints about where to look for microbes with beneficial properties. Microbial commercialization in agriculture is a multibillion dollar industry and still growing.”

Wagner’s KU collaborators have been lead creator Nichole Ginnan, now of the University of California-Riverside, and Natalie Ford, now of Pennsylvania State University; Valéria Custódio, David Gopaulchan, Dylan Jones, Darren Wells and Gabriel Castrillo of the University of Nottingham; Isai Salas-González of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; and Ângela Moreno of the Ministério da Agricultura e Ambiente in Cabo Verde.

“One of the things that makes this work valuable is how interdisciplinary it was,” Wagner stated. “We brought together genetic analysis, plant physiology and microbiology, allowing us to ask and answer questions that couldn’t have been addressed before.”

This analysis was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Integrative Organismal Systems.

Reference: Ginnan NA, Custódio V, Gopaulchan D, et al. Precipitation legacy results on soil microbiota facilitate adaptive drought responses in vegetation. Nat Microbiol. 2025;10(11):2823-2844. doi: 10.1038/s41564-025-02148-8 

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