Research priorities for harnessing plant microbiomes in sustainable agriculture

By P. Busby, C. Soman, Maggie R. Wagner, M. Friesen, J. Kremer, Alison E. Bennett, M. Morsy, Jonathan A. Eisen, J. Leach, Jeffery L. Dangl. PLoS Biology, 2017

701 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Feeding a growing world population amidst climate change requires optimizing the reliability, resource use, and environmental impacts of food production. One way to assist in achieving these goals is to integrate beneficial plant microbiomes—i.e., those enhancing plant growth, nutrient use efficiency, abiotic stress tolerance, and disease resistance—into agricultural production. This integration will require a large-scale effort among academic researchers, industry researchers, and farmers to understand and manage plant-microbiome interactions in the context of modern agricultural systems. Here, we identify priorities for research in this area: (1) develop model host–microbiome systems for crop plants and non-crop plants with associated microbial culture collections and reference genomes, (2) define core microbiomes and metagenomes in these model systems, (3) elucidate the rules of synthetic, functionally programmable microbiome assembly, (4) determine functional mechanisms of plant-microbiome interactions, and (5) characterize and refine plant genotype-by-environment-by-microbiome-by-management interactions. Meeting these goals should accelerate our ability to design and implement effective agricultural microbiome manipulations and management strategies, which, in turn, will pay dividends for both the consumers and producers of the world food supply.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b695bf1905924db91b2d15b5e2780ae7df9b21d1

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Citations in the corpus

Soil microbiome: a key player for conservation of soil health under changing climate (2019, background): “(2016) present one of the few unexploited pool of opportunities to face the sustainability issues of agriculture (Berendsen et al. 2012; Busby et al. 2017; de Vries and Wallenstein 2017; Robertson et al. 2017) under climate change.”
The Role of Soil Microorganisms in Plant Mineral Nutrition—Current Knowledge and Future Directions (2017, background): “However, the sheer complexity of the soil microbiome makes it difficult to draw mechanistic links between specific genes and ecosystem processes, which is one of the reasons why many researchers are adopting SynCom experiments that attempt to re-construct a simplified rhizosphere microbiome in a con”
Core microbiomes for sustainable agroecosystems (2018, background): “…to biotic and abiotic stresses 13–17 offers one of the few untapped reservoirs of opportunities to confront sustainability issues in agriculture 1–3 However, optimization of plant–microbial partnerships is a daunting task given the complexity of plant–microorganism and…”
Cropping practices manipulate abundance patterns of root and soil microbiome members paving the way to smart farming (2018, background): “, those improving plant growth, nutrient use efficiency, abiotic stress tolerance, and disease resistance) into sustainable agricultural production [71].”
Beneficial microbes ameliorate abiotic and biotic sources of stress on plants (2020, background): “A frontier in the evolutionary ecology of the microbiome is to identify key beneficial and antagonistic microbes and to understand the magnitude and generality of their main and interactive effects on plant performance across contrasting environments (Busby et al., 2017).”
The Nodule Microbiome: N2-Fixing Rhizobia Do Not Live Alone (2017, background): “A recent publication described five priorities for research into plant microbiomes for sustainable agriculture: (i) to develop model host–microbiome systems for crop plants and noncrop plants with associated microbial culture collections and reference genomes, (ii) to define core microbiomes and met”
Forest Tree Microbiomes and Associated Fungal Endophytes: Functional Roles and Impact on Forest Health (2019, background): “It is recognized that the understanding of abiotic and biotic factors influencing plant microbial community assembly and stability will be crucial for any effort to manage plant microbiomes [28].”