From Seed to Soil and Back Again: Reductant-Based Phosphorus Solubilization as Test Case for More Holistic Seed Inoculants
Bacterial inoculants offer great promise for disease suppression and maintenance of agricultural yields, especially in marginal soils. Introducing bacteria early in a plant’s life can boost yields and shorten germination times. Despite many promising demonstrations of the power of inoculants, we still don’t have a very mechanistic understanding of how bacteria promote plant growth and how this might be enhanced or sustained. To date, many inoculants are based on pairings of microbes with plant hosts that they may or may not be well suited to colonize. Consequently, most studies suggest inoculants do not persist in soils beyond early growth stages. An important future step for using microbial inoculants to sustain agriculture will be studies blending successes in preserving and packaging microbe with efforts to understand on-plant bacterial viability. This proposal will use reductant-based phosphorus solubilization as a model system to explore the utility of matching microbial inoculants to their environment and host. To test our ideas, we will isolate microbes from local soils and will also explore the use of bacteria that have genetic features that allow them to colonize specific host plants. Our work will build on seed coating technologies as a novel technique to introduce and track microbes. By following the effects of these inoculants on plants we hope to better understand plant-microbe interactions and how they can be leveraged to maintain plant health and agricultural yields.
UM6P project Team
Professor Issam Kadmiri