Chickpea has been considered as a restrictive host for nodulation by rhizobia. However, recent studies have reported that several Mesorhizobium speci

It is well established that soil is a challenging environment for bacteria, where conditions may change rapidly and bacteria have to acclimate and adapt in order to survive. Rhizobia are an important group of soil bacteria due to their ability to establish atmospheric nitrogen-fixing symbioses with many legume species. Some of these legumes are used to feed either humans or cattle and therefore the use of rhizobia can reduce the need for synthetic N-fertilizers. Several environmental factors shape the composition and the activity of rhizobia populations in the rhizosphere. Soil pH and temperature are often considered to be the major abiotic factors in determining the bacterial community diversity. The present review focuses on the current knowledge on the molecular bases of temperature stress response in rhizobia. The effects of temperature stress in the legume-rhizobia symbioses are also addressed.

In the past, bacterial phylogeny relied almost exclusively on 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. More recently, multilocus sequence analysis has been used to infer organismal phylogenies. In this study, the dnaJ chaperone gene was investigated as a marker for phylogeny studies in alphaproteobacteria. Preliminary analysis of G+C contents and G+C3s contents (the G+C content of the synonymous third codon position) showed no clear evidence of horizontal transfer of this gene in proteobacteria. dnaJ-based phylogenies were then analysed at three taxonomic levels: the Proteobacteria, the Alphaproteobacteria and the genus Mesorhizobium. Dendrograms based on DnaJ and 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed the same topology described previously for the Proteobacteria. These results indicate that the DnaJ phylogenetic signal is able to reproduce the accepted relationships among the five classes of the Proteobacteria. At a lower taxonomic level, using 20 alphaproteobacteria, the 16S rRNA gene-based phylogeny is distinct from the one based on DnaJ sequence analysis. Although the same clusters are generated, only the topology of the DnaJ tree is consistent with broader phylogenies from recent studies based on concatenated alignments of multiple core genes. For example, the DnaJ tree shows the two clusters within the Rhizobiales as closely related, as expected, while the 16S rRNA gene-based phylogeny shows them as distantly related. In order to evaluate the phylogenetic performance of dnaJ at the genus level, a multilocus analysis based on five housekeeping genes (atpD, gapA, gyrB, recA and rplB) was performed for ten Mesorhizobium species. In contrast to the 16S rRNA gene, the DnaJ sequence analysis generated a tree similar to the multilocus dendrogram. For identification of chickpea mesorhizobium isolates, a dnaJ nucleotide sequence-based tree was used. Despite different topologies, 16S rRNA gene- and dnaJ-based trees led to the same species identification. This study suggests that the dnaJ gene is a good phylogenetic marker, particularly for the class Alphaproteobacteria, since its phylogeny is consistent with phylogenies based on multilocus approaches.

The aims of this study were to evaluate the temperature stress tolerance of chickpea rhizobia and to investigate whether tolerance is related to the