Abstract
Salt stress creates a combinatorial plant stress encompassing ion toxicity, physiological drought, nutritional imbalance, and oxidative stress. Salinity impacts salt-sensitive and tolerant rice genotypes. Plants also recruit microbes leading to a complex array of microbe-mediated plant responses resulting in a cumulative overall tolerance enhancement to salinity. In this study, label-free proteomics quantification was conducted to assess the responses of rice under salt stress together with microbe-mediated responsive proteomes toward salt stress tolerance. Under salt stress, rice proteomes are mainly influenced by salt stress, rice genotype, and Methylobacterium oryzae CBMB20 inoculation. There are common and genotype-specific upregulated and downregulated differentially abundant proteins (DAPs) in the salt-sensitive IR29 and the salt-tolerant FL478 due to salt stress. However, the 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate (ACC) deaminase-producing M. oryzae CBMB20, which regulates ethylene biosynthesis, mediated changes in the salt-stressed IR29 resulting in similar proteomes to that of FL478. Our study provides a mechanistic understanding of the interactions of an ACC deaminase-producing M. oryzae CBMB20 where a key feature of the microbe-mediated salt stress response is the restoration of the abundance of many downregulated DAPs in rice under salt stress conditions.