Cytoplasmic membrane systems involved in bacterium release into soybean nodule cells as studied with two Bradyrhizobium japonicum mutant strains.

Two Bradyrhizobium japonicum, Tn5-induced, mutant strains, ML126 and ML150, were studied. Both induce host cell division to form normal-sized nodules that do not fix nitrogen and whose cells have very few bacteroids (Bar-). Early-infection (15 days post infection) cells have much endoplasmic reticulum (ER), numerous Golgi bodies, and large vacuoles that are probably secondary lysosomes. Later the cytoplasm of the host cells of both are dominated by hundreds of vesicles containing only finely fibrous material and that appear to originate by the degradation of the cell walls of the infection threads; they have been named "infection-thread wall degradation vesicles" (IWDV). Phosphotungstic acid-chromic acid (PACA) staining of thin sections shows that IWDV membranes and the plasma membranes of both the cells and infection threads usually stain quite intensely, while the membranes of other cell organelles do not. The membranes of the few symbiosomes present in the mutants also stain with PACA. This evidence suggests that largely the host-cell plasma membrane gives rise to both the vesicle and symbiosome membranes in these mutants. In cells induced by both mutants, ER appears to be deficient, a finding suggesting that an ER-synthesis signal is involved in the normal release process, that ER synthesis is prerequisite to a normal volume of release, and that insufficient ER can impair symbiosome formation. In the mutant-induced infections, normal lysosomes develop and engulf both symbiosomes and cytoplasmic vesicles, but the retardation of this activity is the probable cause of the cytoplasm becoming overloaded with vesicles.