RCN: AgMicrobiomes: An Interdisciplinary Research Network to Advance Microbiome Science in Agriculture

土壤和植物支持由细菌、真菌和病毒组成的复杂微生物群。微生物组被认为对农业生产力有重大影响，并作为提高可持续生产足够的食物、饲料和纤维的能力的“新前沿”引起了极大的兴趣，以满足预计到2050年全球90亿人口的需求。然而，由于缺乏跨区域和大陆尺度的农业微生物组系统和全面的数据，我们目前对影响植物微生物组多样性、组成和益处的因素的理解受到限制。该项目将建立农业微生物组项目（AMP），这是一个由科学家、研究地点和专注于农业植物和土壤微生物的模式种植和植物系统组成的全球NSF研究协调网络（RCN）。其广泛的目标是促进我们对农业微生物群及其与植物生产力和可持续作物生产的关系的理解。AMP将通过提供研究合作机会，并为学生和未被充分代表的人口群体提供奖学金，以参与以研讨会为基础的教育和培训活动，积极促进不同研究人员的参与和培训。该RCN旨在提供必要的工具和人力资源，以加速微生物组科学及其在可持续作物生产中的应用。AMP RCN的具体目标是：1。建立一个农业微生物组研究人员的国际网络，以促进和推进农业植物和土壤微生物组的协调合成、协作和综合科学研究；2. 利用现有的国家和国际长期农业研究站点和项目，创建洲际规模的农业微生物组研究平台；3. 通过一系列针对该领域研究人员的研讨会，以及通过在农业微生物组研究与系统和合成生物学、地理信息系统和进化生物学等关键相关领域的工作之间建立联系和伙伴关系的专题讨论会，加强农业微生物组研究基础概念的发展和培训；和4。利用模式植物和种植系统加强对植物微生物组和植物-微生物组-环境相互作用的理解，同时建立将模式系统数据应用和转化为农业微生物组实际管理的策略。该RCN将显著加强土壤和植物微生物组的协作和综合跨系统研究，促进基于组学的微生物组研究的复杂分析的跨学科应用，并为农业系统中大陆到全球范围的微生物组分析提供潜力。

Soil and plants support complex microbiomes composed of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Microbiomes are understood to have significant impacts on agricultural productivity, and have attracted enormous interest as the 'new frontier' for advancing capacities to sustainably produce sufficient food, feed, and fiber to meet the projected global population of 9 billion by 2050. However, our current understanding of the factors that influence the diversity, composition, and benefits of plant microbiomes is limited by a lack of systematic and comprehensive data on agricultural microbiomes across regional and continental scales. This project will establish the Agricultural Microbiomes Project (AMP), a global NSF Research Coordination Network (RCN) of scientists, research sites, and model cropping and plant systems focused on agricultural plant and soil microbes. Its broad goal is to advance our understanding of agricultural microbiomes and their relationships to plant productivity and sustainable crop production. The AMP will work to actively promote engagement and training of diverse researchers by providing opportunities for research collaborations and by offering scholarships for students and those from underrepresented demographics to participate in workshop-based education and training activities.This RCN aims to provide the tools and human resources necessary to accelerate microbiome science and its applications to sustainable crop production. The specific objectives of the AMP RCN are to: 1. Establish an international network of agricultural microbiome researchers to facilitate and advance coordinated synthetic, collaborative, and integrative scientific studies of agricultural plant and soil microbiomes; 2. Leverage existing national and international long-term agricultural research sites and projects to create an intercontinental-scale agricultural microbiome research platform; 3. Enhance development of foundational concepts and training in agricultural microbiomes research through a series of workshops targeted towards researchers in the field, and via symposia that build connections and partnerships between agricultural microbiome research and work in critical related fields such as systems and synthetic biology, geographic information systems, and evolutionary biology; and, 4. Enhance understanding of plant microbiomes and plant-microbiome-environment interactions using model plants and cropping systems, while establishing strategies for applying and translating model system data towards practical management of agricultural microbiomes. This RCN will significantly enhance collaborative and synthetic, cross-system research on soil and plant microbiomes, stimulate cross-disciplinary application of complex analytics for 'omics-based microbiome research, and provide the potential for continental-to-global scale microbiome analyses in agricultural systems.