Rhizophagy (“root eating”) is a process by which plants actively uptake soil microbes into their roots and use oxidative degradation to extract micronutrients from the cells. This phenomenon has been proposed to be a general mechanism for plants to acquire nutrients from the environment via bacteria and fungi. Determining the conditions under which rhizophagy occurs and its prevalence in different plant species will improve our understanding of nutrient dynamics and plant-microbe metabolic interactions at the molecular level. This project aims to (1) optimize methods for plant and microbial growth, imaging, and analysis for the study of rhizophagy and (2) identify a bioenergy-relevant model system for future rhizophagy studies.