Revealing crosstalk of plant and fungi in the symbiotic roots of sewage-cleaning Eichhornia crassipes using direct de novo metatranscriptomic analysis

Cultivation and environmental changes can induce development of novel phenotypes in plants. For example, the root morphology of cultivated purple root Eichhornia crassipes differs remarkably from normal Eichhornia crassipes and also shows an enhanced ability to absorb heavy metal from groundwater. However, the changes in gene expression associated with these processes are unknown because of the lack of information on its large and unsequenced genome and its complex plant-rhizosphere symbiotic system. To investigate these gene expression changes, we applied a new strategy, direct de novo metatranscriptome analysis. Using this approach, we assembled the metatranscriptome of the entire rhizosphere and identified species-specific differentially expressed genes (DEGs) via hyper-accurate algorithms, showing a polarized plant/fungus distribution: the plant genes were responsible for morphological changes to the root system, offering a greater volume and surface area that hosts more fungi; while genes associated with heavy metal response in the fungus Fusarium were upregulated more than 3600-fold. These results suggested a distinct and synergistic functional response by the plant and fungal transcriptomes, indicating significant plant/fungal crosstalk during environmental changes. This study demonstrates that the metatranscriptomic approach adopted here offers a cost-efficient strategy to study symbiosis systems without the need for a priori genomic knowledge.