INTERACT will focus on the essential and mutually beneficial interactions between plants and microbes below ground

Decoding the Rhizobiota Interactome for Improved Crop Resilience (INTERACT)

This project will go beyond a mere inventory of wheat plant microbiome community members, and will provide much needed insight into rhizosphere ecology and microbial communication, with a goal of establishing diagnostic chemical/biological signatures for agro-system stability. With this knowledge, we can rationally and strategically manipulate plant-associated microbial communities to support high plant productivity across challenging climatic and stress scenarios. These critical advances in our understanding of rhizosphere community structure and the chemical landscape that influences its formation and function will be achieved by using genomics, transcriptomics, metaproteomics, metabolomics, in-field and greenhouse plant phenotyping, and network analysis/model construction for evaluating rhizosphere interactions for wheat.