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A Road Map to Finding Microbiomes that Most Contribute to Plant and Soil Health


Journal of Microbiology & Experimentation
George Lazarovits*
Research Director, A&L Biologicals, Agroecological Research Services Centre, Canada

Abstract

The interaction between plants and their associated microbes varies from being beneficial to neutral to deleterious. The development of ecological agriculture, where greatly less extraneous inputs will be used, requires us to identify and deploy microorganism that form beneficial relationships with crops and act to enhance their health and yields. Robust and inexpensive molecular techniques have allowed for rapid identification of key players and their interactions with plants but there is still a need to discover what factors regulate these interactions and to develop methods for delivering microbial products to the environments where they are needed. There is ample evidence that examining agroecosystems where production methods have resulted in exemplary high productivity of plants are the ideal conditions from which to isolate, identify and examine the factors that allow microorganisms to optimally exert their influences on host plants. With the introduction of aerial monitoring of crops, we could identify site specific locations within fields where microbial interactions that allowed us to examine factors associated with the variable productivity of plants within a field. Although we are still at the early stages of such studies there is a high probability that an agroecological approach will allow for the identification of the chemical, physical, environmental and microbiological factors that regulates plant-microbial interactions and to assess how such factors impact crop yields. 

Keywords

Pathogens, Microorganisms, Agriculture, Chemical, Physical, Environmental, Chemical, Physical, Plant-microbial, Nutrients, Phytohormones, Abiotic stresses, Agroecosystem, Metabolism, Physiology, Rhizobium

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