Annals of Botany 95/4 © Annals of Botany Company 2005; all rights reserved
BOOK REVIEWS |
Roots: the dynamic interface between plants and the Earth.
Abe J, ed. 2003.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
165 (hardback). 460 pp
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The contributions can be divided into a smaller number of short reviews that seek to introduce the ‘rhizologist’ (sic) to new techniques and approaches for solving intractable problems. Some of these are better than others, and any selection made by the reviewer is bound to reflect his own prejudices. The embarrassment for the authors is that today's reader will have the benefit of 4 years of hindsight with which to assess their predictions. There is a very readable account of the way in which reporter genes and markers may deepen our insight into the interactions between AM fungi and their hosts, by Bergero, Harrier and Franken (p. 143), and a fascinating account of the way in which soil microbes seem to have co-opted major elements of signalling pathways and development in plants to create structures, sometimes of mutual benefit, in which they can be protected and gain nourishment (contribution by Mathesius, p 105).
The bulk of the contributions are research reports of diverse kinds. It is some time since the reviewer worked in this field, so it was both comforting and a little depressing to see that people are still wrestling with familiar problems. Many of the papers resemble those that were written two or more decades ago. Much of this disappointing progress stems from the difficulty of studying the real processes that occur in very small spaces in the soil and on surfaces of an organ of complex form hidden in an opaque and heterogeneous medium. Compromises of reality are still being employed to make the systems amenable to experiments that can be properly analysed. One looks, therefore, for work that offers news ways of looking at complex systems in a relatively undisturbed state. There are two papers on X-ray imaging plant roots growing in soil, by P. J. Gregory and colleagues (p. 351) and A. Pierret and colleagues (p. 361), but elsewhere researchers are still struggling to convince themselves that mini-rhizotrons and auger samples are telling them what they need to know. No matter how successful these methods are, or will become, they look at the root from the outside and from a great distance with respect to the intricate web of processes that occur at the root–soil interface. Clearly, rhizology has a long way to go, but, given the enormous importance of understanding how roots exploit the resources of the soil, it should enjoy continued support on its journey.
The production of the papers, which have been peer-reviewed, is of the faultless quality one comes to expect from Plant and Soil. There are five papers at the end of the volume that appear to have missed the deadline for the journal but were quickly accepted, perhaps too quickly, by the editor. One of these seems to have been constructed in the style of Donald Rumsfeld – complicated words for simple ideas and no commas in tortuous sentences. We can be grateful to the editor, however, for two very interesting and polished papers in this ‘stop press’ section. Grunewaldt-Stocker and van Alten (p. 445) show that roots infected by non-pathogenic fungi (Acremonium spp. and Glomus intraradices strains) have much increased resistance to Fusarium wilt disease. This is discussed in relation to the creation of physical barriers to the spread of the pathogen, but the report raises the question about whether this might be another manifestation of the phenomenon of induced systemic resistance. There is a brave attempt to combine morphology, biomechanics and simple molecular biology in a paper by Chiatante and colleagues (p. 427) that analyses the developmental response of roots to growing on slopes as opposed to level surfaces.
Many of the more interesting papers in this book reveal new interactions between roots, their environment and the other inhabitants of the soil. While there is much to marvel at here, these observations make the laboratory-grown plant seem depressingly remote from the real world.
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