Trilateral FPP 2023: The role of the microbiome inproviding resilience to multi-stress environments

About This Grant

Extreme weather-related challenges pose a huge threat to agriculture by simultaneously imposing multiple stresses on crops. Microbes, such as beneficial bacteria in the environment, have been shown to enhance plant resilience to some abiotic stresses. However, we do not know what role that bacteria communities can play in multi-stress conditions. In this project, we will use duckweed, an underutilized aquatic plant, as a model to study resilience to multiple stress combinations, such as high temperature and low nutrient levels, in the environment. Duckweed's small size and rapid growth make it an ideal model for such a study. These unique characteristics allow us to test a larger matrix of stress combinations with duckweed than would be possible in any other flowering plant. Furthermore, duckweed itself shows promise as a sustainable food and fuel source due to its ability to grow without arable land, its high productivity, and exceptional nutritional value. The knowledge gained from duckweed about the role that bacteria communities can impart for stress resilience will also likely be directly transferable to crop species, as we have already shown that duckweed-associated bacteria can affect the growth of other land plants. In this project we aim to quantify the effects that a synthetic community of duckweed associated bacteria may play across the largest matrix (6,480 G x E combinations) of environmental stresses examined in a plant-microbe study to date. This ambitious project brings together expertise in different methodologies, including metabolomics (Germany), ecological genomics and transcriptomics (US), as well as morphological and ionomic phenotyping (UK), leveraging state-of-the-art technologies from each of the three partnering countries. This highly interdisciplinary study will determine which components of the microbial community are required for a subset of plant-environment responses. As such, the success of the project will deliver a pathway to increase resilience of crop production by demonstrating how synthetic bacterial communities can be used to enhance large-scale cultivation of duckweed and how they may influence the stress resilience of other crop plants. Duckweed has recently been recognized as a novel food source in the US and EU. Thus, direct beneficiaries of this work include companies looking to rapidly scale up duckweed production, as well as researchers who are interested to translate findings from model plants in the laboratory to improve sustainability of commercial crops. This award was co-funded by the Plant Genome Research Program and Plant Biotic Interactions Program. 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.