CA22158 - Exploiting Plant-Microbiomes Networks and Synthetic Communities to improve Crops Fitness (MiCropBiomes)

Europe faces an increased frequency of drought and heat waves and the appearance of new diseases. It’s urgent to develop alternatives to current agricultural systems that highly depend on agrochemicals and water. CropBiomes grounds on the urgent need for transition to Sustainable Agriculture ensuring food Security and Safety, aligned with both GreenDeal and “Farm-to-Fork” strategy. CropBiomes will gather European experts to coordinate and develop knowledge on crop microbiomes (and holobiomes) for application in precision sustainable agriculture. It will exploit technological advances (e.g., engineered microbiomes) to selectively improve the holobiomes’ resistance to specific environments like drought and diseases. The knowledge of the crop as a “Holobiont” responsible for its fitness, as well as the technologies to explore “hub” taxa to potentiate community-scale networks, and the holobiome fitness, remain yet underexplored in agriculture. 
The networking will be transdisciplinary and balanced (e.g., gender, researchers-career, countries) and intersectoral, structured to generate long-lasting impact. The four Working Groups will go beyond the current state of the art in crop microbiomes. It will define new concepts on topics like plant-microbiomes’ diversity, distribution, eco-evolution, crosstalks, and the microbiomes/holobiomes dynamics and crosstalks under specific environments like soilless systems and environmental stressors (drought/heat, pathogens). Finally, the Action will explore the plant microbiome as a source of beneficial associations of microorganisms, and exploit technologies for engineering the microbiomes (through Synthetic Communities). The CropBiomes will gather senior and early researchers, and different stakeholders and contribute to the competitiveness of Europe in this field.