Exploring the Molecular Imprint of Microbe-Induced Plant Resistance in Plant-Associated Communities

Plant-beneficial microbes can modulate the plant immune system enhancing plant resistance to insect pests. This phenomenon, known as Microbe-Induced plant Resistance (MIR) has emerged as a sustainable pest control strategy.

Strikingly, my latest results indicate that MIR-immune responses elicited in plants cascade upwards leaving a molecular imprint in surviving insect herbivores (a MIR-imprint).

This suggests that MIR-triggered responses in plants could travel beyond the plant and be incorporated into plant-associated communities.

However, inclusion of the effects of MIR-elicited responses across different members of the trophic chain, from plants to herbivores, their natural enemies, and the soil microbiome, has been neglected in MIR research.The overall goal of MIMIR is to unravel how, and to what extent, MIR immune responses triggered in plants are transduced and incorporated in plant-associated communities.

MIMIR will use a multidisciplinary approach combining multi-omics high-throughput techniques, computational biology, functional genomics, and mesocosm experiments to address three main challenges: (1) Disentangling molecular regulation of the onset and functioning of the MIR-imprint in insect herbivores; (2) Unravelling how and to what extent the MIR-imprint crosses to the third trophic level (natural enemies), and its impact on species interactions; and (3) Deciphering how and to what extent MIR imprints the rhizosphere microbiome generating a soil MIR-memory with impacts on aboveground insects.MIMIR will foster a detailed understanding of how MIR-triggered responses travel from the plant to plant-associated communities, and to what extent they are incorporated into the agroecosystem, launching the field into new and exciting directions.

In a broader context, MIMIR will provide multiple crucial insights into the fundamental question of how species interact in complex systems, a question of high relevance for the global challenge of food security.