Abstract
Plants and their associated microbiomes have co-evolved for 500 million years, developing holobionts (combined host-microbiome system) that provide ecological services such as nutrient utilization, development, and pathogen defense, while also exhibiting emergent metabolic and adaptive traits. This talk presents three case studies on how (1) a kingdom-wide conserved plant defense signal has been co-opted to induce lifestyle changes in soil microbiomes to form beneficial biofilms that benefit plant growth from long distances in the rhizosphere; (2) a universal antioxidant microbial metabolite acts as a sulfur nutritional stress tolerance signal for plants in a trans-kingdom tradeoff for its partitioning between microbiome members and plants, and (3) an ecology-guided framework that integrates natural microbial interaction structure with metabolic complementarity has been successfully used to rationally predict cooperative resource exchange for designing beneficial consortia to improve growth promotion and protection. Examples of use of integration of genomic, metabolomic, machine learning and field trials will be shared to demonstrate the path from discovery to translation.
Citation: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Plant Science Research (Plant-2026). USG Proc J 2(Suppl 9): S1-S8.
