A Search for Genes Responsible for the Sense of Touch in Roots of Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract

As plant roots explore soil, they sense not only gravity stimulus but also a variety of other stimuli ranging from water and nutrient gradients to the hardness and porousness of soil. We previously reported a simple bioassay of measuring touch response to physical hardness of growth medium in the primary roots ofArabidopsis thaliana. Putting 5,000 T-DNA tagged lines to the bioassay, we have found 2 putative mutants defective in bending reaction to hardness. The isolation of mutants is now in progress to study the molecular mechanism by which roots sense soil hardness. On the other hand, we have investigated what genes are expressed in touch response to hard medium in the roots, using AFLP-based mRNA fingerprinting (AMF).