Abstract
Legume plants establish symbiosis with soil bacteria called rhizobia to gain nitrogen nutrient from atomospheric N2 via symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF). SNF occurs in a specialized organ called nodule, which develops from dedifferentiated root cortical cells after infection with species-specific rhizobia in the soil. Inside mature nodules, infected cells are accompanied with uninfected cells, and both types of cells are specialized to support the exchange of nutrients, i.e. carbon nutrients from the plant to rhizobia and fixed nitrogen from the rhizobia to the plant. However, except for the nutrients exchange, detailed functional differences between infected and uninfected cells are still to be clarified. To characterize each cell-type in nodules of L. japonicus in detail, the cells were isolated using laser microdissection and analyzed by oligoarray composed of the probes with 60-mer length representing 21,495 unigenes. According to the transcriptome analysis, putative functions of each cell-type will be discussed.
