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

干旱对农业生产力是毁灭性的，预计未来几年干旱强度和频率将增加。尽管正在进行应对危机的研究，但我们远未找到解决危机的单一解决办法；只有在整个农业食品部门采用不同战略的组合才有可能实现变革性的效果。例如，最近的证据表明，与植物密切相关的土壤微生物可能在植物耐旱性中发挥作用。因此，控制这些微生物与植物的有益相互作用是帮助管理植物中水分含量的一个很好的策略。该项目建议使用分子工具、受控条件下的实验和前沿的植物生理特性来解开适应干旱胁迫的植物与微生物之间的关系。该项目将推动我们在了解这种相互作用的演变，以及开发微生物工具或技术以提高农业生态系统的抗旱能力方面取得进展。

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.