Journal
NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
Volume 6, Issue 7, Pages 866-+Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01740-z
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Funding
- Max Planck Society
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (Marine Microbial Initiative Investigator Award) [GBMF3811]
- MARUM Cluster of Excellence 'The Ocean Floor' (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy) [EXC-2077-390741603]
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The accumulation of soluble sugars in seagrass rhizospheres is due to the inhibition of microbial consumption by plant phenolic compounds, providing an explanation for seagrass meadows as important carbon sinks.
Seagrasses are among the most efficient sinks of carbon dioxide on Earth. While carbon sequestration in terrestrial plants is linked to the microorganisms living in their soils, the interactions of seagrasses with their rhizospheres are poorly understood. Here, we show that the seagrass, Posidonia oceanica excretes sugars, mainly sucrose, into its rhizosphere. These sugars accumulate to mu M concentrations-nearly 80 times higher than previously observed in marine environments. This finding is unexpected as sugars are readily consumed by microorganisms. Our experiments indicated that under low oxygen conditions, phenolic compounds from P. oceanica inhibited microbial consumption of sucrose. Analyses of the rhizosphere community revealed that many microbes had the genes for degrading sucrose but these were only expressed by a few taxa that also expressed genes for degrading phenolics. Given that we observed high sucrose concentrations underneath three other species of marine plants, we predict that the presence of plant-produced phenolics under low oxygen conditions allows the accumulation of labile molecules across aquatic rhizospheres. Seagrass meadows are important carbon sinks. Here, the authors show that organic carbon in the form of simple sugars can accumulate at high concentrations in seagrass rhizospheres because plant phenolic compounds inhibit their consumption by microorganisms.
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