Extracting herbicide and antibiotic natural products from a plant-microbe interaction system

Abstract

Plants and their associated microbes live in complicated, changeable, and unpredictable environments. They usually interact with each other in many ways by proceeding in multi-dimensional, multi-scale and multi-level coupling manners, leading to challenges of the co-existence of randomness and determinism, or continuity and discreteness. Gaining a deeper understanding of these diverse interaction mechanisms can facilitate the development of new data mining theories and methods for complex systems, new coupled modelling for the system with different spatiotemporal scales and functional properties, or even universal theory of information and information interactions. In this study, we use a "close-loop" model to present a plant-microbe interaction system and describe the probable functions from the microbial natural products. Specifically, we report a rhizosphere species, Streptomyces ginsengnesis G7, which produces polyketide lydicamycins and other active metabolites. Interestingly, these distinct molecules have the potential to function both as antibiotics and herbicides for crop protection. Detailed laboratory experiments combined with comprehensive bioinformatics analysis allow us to rationalise a model for this specific plant-microbe interaction process. Our work reveals the benefits of exploring otherwise neglectable resources for the identification of novel functional molecules and provides a good reference to better understand the system biology in the complex ecosystems.