miCROPe 2019 – emerging research priorities towards microbe-assisted crop production

Abstract

The miCROPe 2019 symposium, which took place from 2–5 December 2019 in Vienna, Austria, has unified researchers and industry from around the world to discuss opportunities, challenges and needs of microbe-assisted crop production. There is broad consensus that microorganisms—with their abilities to alleviate biotic and abiotic stresses and to improve plant nutrition—offer countless opportunities to enhance plant productivity and to ameliorate agricultural sustainability. However, microbe-assisted cultivation approaches face challenges that need to be addressed before a breakthrough of such technologies can be expected. Following up on the miCROPe symposium and a linked satellite workshop on breeding for beneficial plant-microbe interactions, we carved out research priorities towards successful implementation of microbiome knowledge for modern agriculture. These include (i) to solve context dependency for microbial inoculation approaches and (ii) to identify the genetic determinants to allow breeding for beneficial plant-microbiome interactions. With the combination of emerging third generation sequencing technologies and new causal research approaches, we now stand at the crossroad of utilising microbe-assisted crop production as a reliable and sustainable agronomic practice.

Untangling the Pea Root Rot Complex Reveals Microbial Markers for Plant Health

“…The assessed microbial taxa formed complex co-occurrence networks in each infested soil with several central taxa conserved across the three soils. Soil-dependent factors have repeatedly been documented as important drivers of plant-associated microbial composition (Peiffer et al, 2013;Chemidlin Prevost-Boure et al, 2014;Xue et al, 2018;Hohmann et al, 2020). Our data is in line with this fundamental observation but also suggested that several taxa form a core of key players of the PRRC.…”

“…Together, these findings indicated a relation between host genotype, microbial composition, and disease resistance. In light of such findings, plant breeding offers the opportunity to harness positive plantmicrobe interactions and strengthen crop resistance (Wei and Jousset, 2017;Hohmann et al, 2020).…”

Tackling the Context-Dependency of Microbial-Induced Resistance

“…The advantage of these approaches is that they recruit ISR-inducing bacteria under the prevailing crop cultivation conditions, enhancing the chances that they are indeed functional under these conditions. In addition, several studies have argued for new crop breeding strategies that enhance the ability of crops to better exploit associations with beneficial microbes by enhanced attraction of beneficials, enhanced symbiosis, or enhanced plant responses to this symbiosis (e.g., [121]). Several studies have revealed the plant genetic underpinnings of enhanced microbially induced pest suppression (e.g., [122]), making this a viable prospect that can be tailored specifically to ISR-inducing microbes.…”

Evidence for microbiome-dependent chilling tolerance in sorghum

“…Simultaneously evaluating diverse sorghum genotypes for genetic chilling tolerance and microbe-enhanced chilling tolerance would leverage a novel synergistic approach to early season chilling tolerance. Plant genotype-environment-microbe interactions in field conditions are highly complex (Bakker et al 2020, Hohmann et al 2020, Oyserman et al 2019)). Developing broadly effective microbial enhancements for plant abiotic stress will require incorporating plant genotype – microbe – environment interactions in controlled experiments.…”