The rhizosphere metabolome exhibits diurnal oscillations and spatial stratification in soil-grown plants

One RDS file containing sample metadata and chemical feature peak area data generated using MetaboAnalyist software, and one xls file with tentative chemical IDs corresponding to hte chemical features in the RDS file.

The abstract for the paper generated using this data is as follows:

The rhizosphere metabolome includes compounds exuded in a thin layer from plant root, and may affect the assembly and composition of microbial communities. Characterizing the dynamic nature and composition of the rhizosphere metabolome is a key to furthering our understanding of plant health and fitness, due to the pervasive effects of microbial associates on host plant phenotypes. Untargeted metabolomic sampling of the rhizosphere metabolome in a biologically relevant manner is methodologically challenging, as plant growth in hydroponic systems or in soil followed by immersion for sampling leads to osmotic imbalance that may dramatically alter exudation; in-situ sampling in soil has proven largely intractable to date. In this study, we utilized microdialysis probes to sample in-situ areas of high and low root density of soil-grown plants as well as soils containing no plants to determine spatial and temporal variability in the soil metabolome. We found high temporal and spatial variability, with diel cycling of chemical features occurring both in the rhizosphere of soil-grown plants and in soils containing no plants. Chemical features unique to the plant rhizosphere and unique to plant genomes, such as putative glucosinolates, also exhibited temporal diel cycling. This observation suggests that both compounds in the plant rootzone or arising from free-living microbes may exhibit rhythmic patterns. Our study showed that microdialysis probes are a viable method of rhizosphere metabolome sample collection, with both fine scale and fine temporal sensitivity, able to sample within highly biologically relevant soil systems.