Tag: Microbiome

Community and ecosystem ecology are the main pillars of agroecology. Plants exude various chemicals from their roots to communicate with  belowground microorganisms to boost productivity. This article by Urcelay et al. offers a new perspective to understand the interaction between plants and arbuscular…

Nitrogen is a key nutrient for plant development, and plant nutrient acquisition is highly influenced by the rhizosphere microbiome. However, how host genomic variation and root transcriptional regulation shape microbiome assembly under field conditions remains unclear. Li and colleagues addressed this…

The “Green Revolution” transformed global food production through the use of fertilizer, but at the expense of rising costs and reliance on non-renewable inputs, prompting modern agriculture to shift toward alternative strategies such as the symbiotic relationships between plants and soil microorganisms.…

There is ample evidence for the impacts of plant microbiomes to plant growth and metabolism, but there are also challenges to obtaining reproducible data. In a first of its kind multi-laboratory microbiome reproducibility study, researchers from five groups across three continents used prefabricated…

When plants grow shoulder to shoulder in crowded fields, they don’t just compete for space and sunlight—they also “talk” to one another. This underground and airborne chatter, carried by leaf volatiles and root exudates, helps plants sense nearby neighbors and prepare for threats. But how exactly…

In Chinese, there is an old poem suggesting that livestock bites promote crop yield in the succeeding year. In this new work, Hu et al. provide evidence to support the traditional wisdom and propose the mechanism behind it. Previous studies showed that herbivore bites on leaves induce the release of…

The soil microbiome harbors a vast diversity of microorganisms that can be pathogenic, beneficial, or commensal to plants. A fundamental question in plant biology is how plants actively detect, differentiate, and optimize their associations with the microbiome to maintain optimal fitness. In a recent…

Don’t miss this exciting Virtual Issue from New Phytologist on “plant-microbe-microbe” interactions. That’s not a typo – many of the articles address the signals that coordinate such multi-factorial interactions, as there is a growing recognition that interrelations between microbes influence…