Travel grant to Marie Rønne Aggerbeck
Thanks to a travel grant from the Collaborative Crop Resiliency Program (CCRP), PhD Student Marie Rønne Aggerbeck from Aarhus University (AU) is heading to North Carolina State University (NCSU) to work in Assist. Prof. Manuel Kleiner's lab.
Marie plans to elucidate plant-microbe interactions in wheat roots by monitoring the root exudate carbon flow. Over the past few months, she conducted several closed system rhizobox experiments, exposing wheat seedlings to 13C-labelled CO2. The plants will take up the labelled CO2 and incorporate it into their tissue and metabolites, which is then in turn exuded into the rhizosphere soil. Here it it is further metabolized by the surrounding soil microbial community.
At the Kleiner lab, Marie will investigate the metabolome of the wheat rhizosphere as a joint effort between AU and NCSU, as well as learning stable isotope probing, to be able to pinpoint any compounds containing the labelled compound. Targeting the 13C stable isotope label in both proteins and metabolites should then allow us to pinpoint which microbes and which metabolic pathways are heavily associated with root exudate biotransformation.
Marie will depart from Denmark on the 14th of February 2021 and will stay for four months at NCSU.