Duckweed as an Emerging Model System for Plant-Microbiome Interactions

Understanding the processes through which plant-associated microbiomes influence host physiology and fitness is a central goal of plant-microbiome interaction research. While traditional model plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana have provided foundational platforms to examine these processes, alternative model systems may address certain bottlenecks in current research. In recent years, duckweeds (family Lemnacea) have emerged as a unique model plant offering several experimental advantages owing to their small size, simple morphology, aquatic habitat, and two-dimensional clonal growth. These features facilitate the establishment of highly tractable and reproducible model systems that facilitate robust investigations and high-throughput screening platforms, enabling multifactorial massive parallel experiments. This review provides an overview of the recent studies that have applied the advantages of using duckweed in the field of plant-microbiome interactions to highlight how duckweed-based systems have enabled unique experimental approaches that are difficult in conventional systems. We have also discussed the emerging directions in duckweed-microbiome research, including elucidation of the co-evolutionary processes mediated via metabolic exchange and bottom-up explanation of community structure and functions using synthetic bacterial communities. Together, this review underscores the potential of duckweed to serve as a distinctive model for advancing plant-microbiome interaction research.