Plants are the key primary producers in most terrestrial ecosystems and generally exploit soils for resources using complex root systems. The rhizosphere is the soil environment that is directly influenced by the presence and activities of roots, and defined as a nutrient‐rich area surrounding roots with decreased microbial diversity and increased biomass, activity, biological interactions and ...

Many bacteria glide over surfaces without the aid of flagella. Gliding is still somewhat mysterious, but recent studies show that it involves specialized secretory systems that assemble membrane-associated filaments, and the recognition of extracellular components that trigger movement via transmembrane transducers.

Gliding motility is critical for normal development of spore-filled fruiting bodies in the soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. Mutations in mgl block motility and development but one mgl allele can be suppressed by a mutation in masK, the last gene in an operon adjacent to the mgl operon. Deletion of the entire 5.5 kb masABK operon crippled gliding and fruiting body development and decreased spo...

Mycoplasma pneumoniae exhibits a novel form of gliding motility that is mediated by the terminal organelle, a differentiated polar structure. Given that genes known to be involved in gliding in other organisms are absent in M. pneumoniae, random transposon mutagenesis was employed to generate mutants with gliding-deficient phenotypes. Transposon insertions in the only annotated Ser/Thr protein ...