Collaborative Research: URoL:ASC: Microbiome-mediated plant genetic resistance for enhanced agricultural sustainability

Agricultural plant production provides humans with some of our most basic needs including food, fiber and shelter. Yet conventional agricultural practices cause damage to ecosystems and undermine their capacity. Greater pathogen pressure and drought stress associated with climate change add to this challenge by reducing crop yields.

Breeding plants to recruit beneficial microbes from the environment conferring disease resistance and stress tolerance has been proposed, but the research community has lacked a coordinated effort to develop and critically evaluate this approach. This URoL project will develop and study crop varieties that enhance agricultural sustainability by assembling microbial communities that enhance resistance to major current and emergent biotic and abiotic stresses.

The research will be conducted in three widely grown crops: wheat, tomato, and poplar. New knowledge and genetic material will be widely shared to enable rapid adoption by breeding programs and producers around the world. In focal studies of wheat, collaboration with tribal and non-tribal wheat farmers in Oregon will foster the co-production of knowledge and build capacity in rural wheat farming communities.

The education program will provide employment and training to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars. Partnerships with Heritage University and Blue Mountain Community College will help to recruit students from traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM to our undergraduate summer program. An outreach program coordinated with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry seeks to improve the public understanding of plant microbiomes in agriculture through hands-on activities in museums, libraries, and county fairs.

An emerging rule of life is that plant genetic variation shapes the assembly of its microbiome. The microbiome in turn affects critical plant functions. This URoL project seeks to understand and apply these rules to agriculture by breeding plants to recruit microbial communities conferring disease resistance and drought tolerance.

The first aim is to identify genetic targets underlying microbiome-mediated genetic resistance to major current and emergent biotic and abiotic stresses. By testing diverse species – an annual grass (wheat), annual dicot (tomato), and a perennial dicot (poplar trees) – the project will investigate the rules governing the relationships among pathogenic microbes, beneficial microbes, and host genotypes.

The overarching hypothesis is that host genotypes select for disease-suppressive microbes across crops, though specific molecular, physiological, and ecological mechanisms may differ among systems. The second aim will test whether genetic targets impacting particular pathogens are associated with resistance to additional pathogens and to drought stress.

Together, this work will lead to the development of wheat, tomato, and poplar cultivars expressing microbiome-mediated genetic resistance to important biotic and biotic stresses. Overall, the contributions of this URoL project will be wide-ranging, spanning plant breeding and genetics, genomics, plant pathology, microbiology, microbial community ecology, and transdisciplinary sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.