Abstract
The exponential growth in world population is feeding a steadily increasing global need for arable farmland, a resource that is already in high demand. This trend has led to increased farming on subprime arid and semi-arid lands, where limited availability of water and a host of environmental stresses often severely reduce crop productivity. The conventional approach to mitigating the abiotic stresses associated with arid climes is to breed for stress-tolerant cultivars, a time and labor intensive venture that often neglects the complex ecological context of the soil environment in which the crop is grown. In recent years, studies have attempted to identify microbial symbionts capable of conferring the same stress-tolerance to their plant hosts, and new developments in genomic technologies have greatly facilitated such research. Here, we highlight many of the advantages of these symbiont-based approaches and argue in favor of the broader recognition of crop species as ecological niches for a diverse community of microorganisms that function in concert with their plant hosts and each other to thrive under fluctuating environmental conditions.
Highlights
Climate change and an increasing world population are predicted to drastically increase the global need for arable farmland, a resource that is already in high demand (Barrow et al, 2008)
We present suggestions for future directions of abiotic stress tolerance improvement in crop plants, including the use of cutting edge genomic technologies for the identification and selection of candidate symbionts and the functional modules they employ for enhancing host growth, as well as an assessment of current agronomic practices in the light of modern understanding of microbial community influence over plant phenotype
A second challenge stems from the fact that while many plant growth-promoting microorganisms (PGPM) have been shown to confer their benefits across multiple host species, it is clear that this is not always the case
Summary
Climate change and an increasing world population are predicted to drastically increase the global need for arable farmland, a resource that is already in high demand (Barrow et al, 2008). Changes in the global climate may well compound this challenge, as predicted increases in drought and temperature-related stresses are expected to reduce crop productivity (Ciais et al, 2005; Grover et al, 2010; Larson, 2013) This large expansion in agricultural output will require both improvements in crop yield as well as the cultivation of additional farmland. The most well-studied of these symbionts include the mycorrhizal fungi, which enhance nutrients uptake (Bonfante and Anca, 2009) and root-nodulating bacteria, which fix nitrogen from the surrounding soil (Lugtenberg and Kamilova, 2009), but many other novel plant growth-promoting microorganisms (PGPM) continue to be identified each year These organisms confer stress resistance via diverse mechanisms recently reviewed elsewhere (Lugtenberg and Kamilova, 2009; Yang et al, 2009; Grover et al, 2010; de Zelicourt et al, 2013; Nadeem et al, 2014). We conclude with an argument in favor of increased collaboration between conventional breeding programs and microbial-based research for crop improvement and, more generally, for a broader conceptual understanding of crop productivity as a complex product of plant genetics and microbial community function
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