Microarray analyses during early and later stages of the Arabidopsis/Piriformospora indica interaction

Colonization of the roots of different plant species by Piriformospora indica results in better plant performance and biotic and abiotic stress tolerance. An increase of the biomass and seed yield is other beneficial effect of P. indica for the host plants. The interaction of P. indica with Arabidopsis thaliana roots is a unique model system to study symbiotic relationships. We describe a co-cultivation system which allows us to investigate the effects of fungal exudates on the root transcriptome before and after the establishment of a physical contact, and during early phases of root colonization. We present a detailed protocol which facilitates easy reproduction of the results (NCBI GEO accession number GSE58771) published by Vahabi et al. (2015) in BMC Plant Biology [1].