Abstract
Rhizobia are soil proteobacteria able to establish a nitrogen-fixing interaction with legumes. In this interaction, rhizobia must colonize legume roots, infect them, and become hosted inside new organs formed by the plants and called nodules. Rhizobial motility, not being essential for symbiosis, might affect the degree of success of the interaction with legumes. Because of this, the study of rhizobial motility (either swimming or surface motility) might be of interest for research teams working on rhizobial symbiotic performance. In this chapter, we describe the protocols we use in our laboratories for studying the different types of motilities exhibited by Sinorhizobium fredii and Sinorhizobium meliloti, as well as for analyzing the presence of flagella in these bacteria. All these protocols might be used (or adapted) for studying bacterial motility in rhizobia.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants PID2019-107634RB-I00 and PID2021-123540NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and “ERDF A way of making Europe,” US-1250546 funded by FEDER/Universidad de Sevilla,and grant P20_00225 from “Consejería de Economía, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad” (Junta de Andalucía, PAIDI 2020).
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Fuentes-Romero, F. et al. (2024). Methods for Studying Swimming and Surface Motilities in Rhizobia. In: Medina, C., López-Baena, F.J. (eds) Host-Pathogen Interactions. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2751. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3617-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3617-6_13
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