Artificial Soil (ArtSoil): recreating soil conditions in synthetic plant growth media

Study described the development of Artificial Soil (ArtSoil), a growth medium containing essential nutrients for plant growth and aqueous soil extract (ASE) to maintain soil microbiomes and edaphic factors, simultaneously eliminating the need for sugar supplementation in the medium. We compared Arabidopsis thaliana grown on conventional media to ArtSoil under various growth conditions, and showed that plants grown on ArtSoil did not exhibit physiological side effects induced by sucrose. We demonstrate an application for ArtSoil in single-cell transcriptomics and report microbiota-induced cell-type specificity in immune and nitrogen signaling. We tested ArtSoil with six types of ASEs to present the potential of ArtSoil in decoupling the effects of nutrients from microbiota in plant growth. We conclude that ArtSoil recapitulates the soil environment compared to conventional media, hence, enabling physiologically relevant plant growth.