Harnessing Wild Plant Microbiomes to Enhance Stress Resilience in Cultivated Crops
Plants growing in extreme environments from hyper-arid deserts to steep elevation gradients host microbial communities that play central roles in nutrient acquisition, stress mitigation, and soil functioning. In this seminar, I will explore how we can move from characterizing these microbiomes in wild relatives to engineering them as tools for sustainable agriculture. Using examples from date palm and wild grapevine microbiomes, I will show how ecological filters select for highly functional microbial hubs and plant-beneficial traits. I will then bridge these insights to the design of synthetic microbial communities (SynComs) and to the emerging field of AMF upscaling, including recent bioreactor-based approaches and lipid-engineering strategies. Together, these perspectives illustrate how combining microbial ecology with biotechnology can reduce chemical inputs, strengthen soil health, and enhance crop resilience under climate change.