19-BBSRC-NSF/BIO: A holistic approach to understand drought adaptation in plants, their symbionts, and free-living microbiomes

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Drought is devastating to agricultural productivity, and drought intensity and frequency are expected to increase in the coming years. Despite ongoing studies to address the crisis, we are far to find a single solution that will solve it; only combinations of different strategies applied across the AgriFood sector has the potential to achieve transformative effects. For example, recent evidences suggest that soil microbes that live in close association with plants may play a role in plant drought tolerance. Hence, controlling the beneficial interaction of these microbes with the plant is an excellent strategy to help manage water content in the plant. This project proposes to use molecular tools, experiments under controlled conditions, and cutting-edge plant physiological characterization to disentangle the plant-microbe relationships in the context of adaptation to drought stress. This project would advance our progress toward both, understanding the evolution of this interaction, and the development of microbial tools or techniques to improve drought resilience in agroecosystems.