Dynamics of Plant Microbiome and Its Effect on the Plant Traits

Abstract

Plants host a plethora of complex microbial communities in and on their surfaces designated as plant microbiome. The plant microbiome symbolizes the collective communities of microbes, their (meta) genomes and their interactions (mutualism-antagonism continuum) in a particular environment. The cross-talk between plant microbiome plays an important function in the performance of plant and is hot topic for research in biology. Plant microbiome endows the plant with resistance to biotic and abiotic factors, promotes plant growth and enriches the soil associated with the plant. The plant trait expression is regulated by the orchestrated effect of plant as well as microbial genes. Therefore, there is an urgent need to explore the diversity and the functionally potential of microbial communities. However, a big challenge in the present scenario is to widen technologies to improve agricultural management, e.g. plant growth promotion, biocontrol and bioremediation. Recent advances in sequencing technologies and multi-omics approaches integrate the studies on plant-microbe interactions, which gives an insight about what’s happening in real-time within the cells. Metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics have come up as a holistic approach that give a picture of major metabolic pathways and the plant-associated interactions. These technologies clearly depict which functional microbial communities are dominant in crop plants and under different environmental conditions. The integration of various computational tools helps to decode the functions of proteins, individual signal molecules and gene cascades, with respect to their pathways.