Welcome
Welcome to the COST Action CA22158 MiCropBiomes: Exploiting Plant-Microbiomes Networks and Synthetic Communities to Improve Crops’ Fitness!
Europe faces an increased frequency of drought and heat waves and the appearance of new diseases. It’s urgent to develop alternatives to current agricultural systems that highly depend on agrochemicals and water. The MiCropBiomes COST Action grounds on the urgent need for transition to sustainable agriculture ensuring food security and safety, aligned with both GreenDeal and “Farm-to-Fork” strategy. The MiCropBiomes COST Action gathers European experts to coordinate and develop knowledge on crop microbiomes (and holobiomes) for application in precision sustainable agriculture. It will exploit technological advances (e.g., engineered microbiomes) to selectively improve the holobiomes’ resistance to specific environments like drought and diseases. The knowledge of the crop as a “holobiont” responsible for its fitness, as well as the technologies to explore “hub” taxa to potentiate community-scale networks, and the holobiome fitness, remain yet underexplored in agriculture.
The MiCropBiomes COST Action is transdisciplinary and balanced (e.g., gender, researchers-career, countries) and intersectoral, and structured to generate long-lasting impact. Four Working Groups will go beyond the current state of the art in crop microbiomes. They will define new concepts on topics like plant-microbiomes’ diversity, distribution, eco-evolution, cross talks, and the microbiomes/holobiomes dynamics and cross talks under specific environments like soilless systems and environmental stressors (drought/heat, pathogens). Finally, the MiCropBiomes COST Action will explore the plant microbiome as a source of beneficial associations of microorganisms, and exploit technologies for engineering the microbiomes (through synthetic communities). The MiCropBiomes COST Action will gather senior and early researchers, and different stakeholders and thus contribute to the competitiveness of Europe in this field.