Microbes Reshaping Root Cells
Climate change has reshaped our environment, agriculture, and well-being. Plants show remarkable resilience when facing singular challenges like floods or drought, partially due to shifts in the structure of their individual root cells. Climate change’s extreme pace and impact highlight a demand for plants to withstand multiple stresses, possibly by inducing simultaneous shifts in several root cell types. Despite the vast knowledge of the mechanisms of these acclimations, inducing multi-stress resilience in crops via genetics remains challenging. Recently, we obtained the first evidence that microbes can reshape several root cell types of crop species towards stress-protective forms. Understanding which set of microbes is required to induce optimal combinations of root cell-type-specific acclimations opens avenues to use microbes to induce multi-stress resilience.
Suberin-Inducing Microbes
Recently, we discovered bacteria, whose presence in agricultural soil corresponded to increased suberin levels in root endodermis of one of the most important cereal crops, sorghum. Among these Suberin-Inducing Microbes (SIMs), Arthrobacter strain VK49 showed the highest activity (Fig. 1B). Therefore, applying VK49 onto roots provides an exciting opportunity to enhance crop multi-stress resilience. This new method of improving stress resilience will be particularly impactful for crops that are staple for regions struck most severely with extreme climate events, crops with long breeding cycles, or those for which effective genetic modification methods are lacking.