My research focus is on the application of heterotrophic protists to support a sustainable agriculture.

Bacterial communities strongly affect plant phenotypes while being themselves top-down regulated in the rhizosphere. Important predators of bacteria are unicellular eukaryotic organisms, known as protists. Protists typically reached 10 thousand individuals per gram of soil, presenting a huge diversity and supporting essential ecological functions.

In the present project, we want to take advantage of this diversity: we aim to select and apply free-living, heterotrophic protists as modulators of bacterial commmunity composition and activity. To achieve this, we want to unravel the predictive rules for protist-bacteria interactions. We are standardizing methodology to study soil protist population. We are investigating prey-predators interactions in laboratory experiments (plate and pot assay) assessing the consistency of bacterial traits providing resistance against predation and the consequences for the plants. Eventually, we will design bio-inoculants (protists, protist and bacteria) and test their success in a green house experiment.