The key to the next agricultural revolution? A national task force released a scientific paper Aug. 24 that  says the answer lies in the microbiome – the communities of microorganisms that co-exist on, in and near plants.

According to Ignazio Carbone and Megan Andrews, scientists with ties to North Carolina State University who co-chaired the task force, “Past success with microbial solutions combined with new understanding and technology has great promise to lead to the agricultural revolution required to continue to feed our world.”

Achieving that promise, they say, will require increased funding and better infrastructure for related research, more interdisciplinary collaboration, and improved strategies for science communication, public engagement, product regulation and policy development.

The task force’s paper, published by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, is available for free download.

The publication’s authors say that today’s agricultural challenges are alarming: The world population is growing quickly, but the amount of cropland per capita has declined, available farmland is being consumed by urban development at unprecedented rates, the climate is changing, and crop yields are plateauing.

Now, they say, the time is right to focus on the plant microbiome as a source of agricultural solutions for improving crop productivity.

 “Researchers now have a better understanding of just how complex plant-soil-microbe interactions can be,” Carbone and Andrews say. “Current advances in technology and data processing now make it possible to collect and analyze the enormous amounts of data needed to study this level of complexity, and growing support for stewardship of the land and environment call for solutions to increase crop yields while reducing chemical and water inputs.”

Carbone said new methodologies will “allow researchers to identify a larger proportion of the microbiome and thus generate a more complete picture of who is present in a complex microbiome sample.”

Putting that knowledge to work through the production of new biological products can take time and can involve many regulations. Cutting-edge technologies make microbial data useful, but to be successfully used, they must be effectively communicated to public audiences.

As task force member Andrew Binder, of NC State’s Department of Communication, says, “Even the evaluation of how risky or beneficial people see a technology can be tightly related to the ties that a person has to others in their family, among friends, and in their broader community.”

Harnessing the power of microbes, the task force notes, will require investments in interdisciplinary education, research and technologies, new partnerships and new models for education and training. The task force report concludes with six recommendations:

At NC State, Carbone and Andrews say, the North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative has positioned the university and its partners to help tackle the task force recommendations by leveraging strong interdisciplinary teams of scientists at NC State and long-standing relationships with agricultural biotechnology companies and commodity groups.

They say that it’s critical for academia and industry to work together to accelerate the discovery and commercialization of new microbe-based agricultural solutions.

Right now, Carbone and his colleagues are researching how microbes are evolving in agricultural fields; whether microbial community structure is influenced by the plants and other organisms that occupy the same space; and the genetic mechanisms that allow microbes to rapidly respond to environmental perturbations like drought, flood, nutrient shortages, or plant diseases.

In addition to Andrews, Carbone and Binder, task force authors are Natalie Breakfield, NewLeaf Symbiotics; Owen Duckworth, North Carolina State University; Kirk Francis, BASF; Susanna L. Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Linda Kinkel, University of Minnesota; Jan Leach, Colorado State University: Gregory Maloney, Novozymes North America, Inc.; Kelci Miclaus, SAS Institute, Inc.; Elizabeth Shank, University of Massachusetts Medical School; Elizabeth Stulberg, Alliance of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Science Societies; Carolyn Young, Noble Research Institute; and Sherryl Yu-Su, Novozymes North America, Inc.

The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology is an international consortium of scientific and professional societies, companies, and nonprofit organizations. Through its network of experts, CAST assembles, interprets, and communicates credible, balanced, science-based information to policymakers, the media, the private sector, and the public.

Source: North Carolina State University,  which is solely responsible for the information provided, and wholly owns the information. Informa Business Media and all its subsidiaries are not responsible for any of the content contained in this information asset.