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Published on: February 9, 2019
Sulfatase Assay to Determine Influence of Plants on Microbial Activity in Soil
Anna Koprivova1, Achim Schmalenberger2, Stanislav Kopriva1
1Botanical Institute and Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences (CEPLAS), University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Abstract:
Sulfatase activity is often used as a measure of the activity of soil microorganisms. It is thus a suitable tool to investigate the response of microbes to plants. Here we present a method to determine the influence of various Arabidopsis genotypes on the function of soil microbiota using the sulfatase as a quantitative measure. We grew the plants in soil/sand mix under control conditions and measured the sulfatase activity in soil using a spectrophotometric determination of the product. This protocol can be used to test the contribution of individual genes to control of microbiome assembly through analysis of mutants as well as the influence of environment on plant-microbe interactions.

