Bacterial Shoot Apical Meristem Inoculation Assay.

ABSTRACT

By virtue of their sessile nature, plants may not show the fight-and-flight response, but they are not devoid of protecting themselves from disease-causing agents, attack by herbivores, and damages that are caused by other environmental factors. Plants differentially protect their life-sustaining organs such as plant apexes from the attack by microbial pathogens. There are well-established methods to inoculate/infect various plant parts such as leaves, roots, and stems with various different pathogens. The plant shoot apical meristems (SAM) are a high-value plant target that provides niche to stem cell populations. These stem cells are instrumental in maintaining future plant progenies by giving birth to cells that culminate in flowers, leaves, and stems. There are hardly few protocols available that allow us to study immune dynamics of the plant stem cells as they are hindered by various layers of the SAM cell populations. Here, we describe a step-by-step method on how to inoculate the Arabidopsis SAM with model plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000.