Meeting Proposal: Microbiomes for Sustainable Agriculture; Asilomar, CA - Summer, 2015

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This workshop will bring together and international group of scientists to synthesize research knowledge and identify research priorities about the interactions between plants and their associated microbes. Plants obtain a variety of benefits from microbes, including nutrient acquisition and efficiency, disease resistance, and stress tolerance. However, the microbes studied constitute a miniscule fraction of the diversity associated with plants. New molecular and computational tools now make it practical to conduct comprehensive, inquiry-based studies of plant-associated microbiomes. Improving our understanding of microbiomes and optimizing them for domesticated crop plants is expected to greatly enhance sustainability in agricultural systems. To ensure that the outcomes of the meeting will be broadly used, it will include scientists from the U.S., Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, and representatives of non-profit and governmental organizations. In the face of challenges posed by climate change and population growth, the motivation for the proposed meeting is to make rapid progress in our understanding of the potential contribution of plant-associated microbiomes to agricultural productivity and sustainability. A focused meeting among leading experts in a variety of related fields will be uniquely effective in initiating collaborations that accelerate research on understanding and utilizing plant-associated microbiomes. The objectives of the proposed meeting are: (i) synthesize the current state of knowledge, and associated technologies, in crop plant breeding and crop plant microbiomes; (ii) identify critical research needs in these areas, set research goals, and identify new collaborations; (iii) initiate publications to communicate the developed consensus around future research objectives and priorities and develop new collaborative research projects.