M/Z: 317.1932

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 µM 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.

Sample information Organism: Drosophila melanogaster Organism part: Brain Condition: Healthy Sample preparation Sample stabilisation: Frozen Tissue modification: Frozen MALDI matrix: 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid (DHB) MALDI matrix application: TM sprayer Solvent: Aceton/water MS analysis Polarity: Positive Ionisation source: Prototype Analyzer: Orbitrap Pixel size: 5μm × 5μm Annotation settings m/z tolerance (ppm): 3 Analysis version: Original MSM Pixel count: 469910 Imzml file size: 696.23 MB Ibd file size: 814.11 MB