Europe faces an increased frequency of drought and heat waves and the appearance of new diseases. It’s urgent to develop alternatives to current agricultural systems that highly depend on agrochemicals and water. CropBiomes grounds on the urgent need for transition to Sustainable Agriculture ensuring food Security and Safety, aligned with both GreenDeal and “Farm-to-Fork” strategy.
The aim of this Cost Action is to coordinate the available knowledge on plant´s microbiome assembly, and its potential to increase crop holobiome resistance to drought and heat, or diseases. It also aims to explore advances in ingineering microbiomes, and aid in management and policy tools to improve the resilience of crop plants.

There are 164 researchers into the project, and they work on the five Working Groups (WG) that composes the cost action.

They  will go beyond the current state of the art in crop microbiomes:  

• WG1 Exploiting Plant-Microbiome molecular crosstalks: diversity, distribution and ecoevolutionary perspectives
• WG2 Crop-Microbiome assembly dynamics under specific environments
• WG3 Crop microbiomes and plant diseases: from dysbiosis to increased defenses
• WG4 From current microbial inoculants to synthetic communities
• WG5 Communication, and engagement with society

The cost action  will define new concepts on topics like plant-microbiomes’ diversity, distribution, eco-evolution, crosstalks, and the microbiomes/holobiomes dynamics and crosstalks under specific environments like soilless systems and environmental stressors (drought/heat, pathogens). Finally, the Action will explore the plant microbiome as a source of beneficial associations of microorganisms, and exploit technologies for engineering the microbiomes (through Synthetic Communities). The CropBiomes will gather senior and early researchers, and different stakeholders and contribute to the competitiveness of Europe in this field.

This is a four-year’s project started in 02/10/2023 and will end in 01/10/2027 financed by the EU under the Cost Action CA 22158.

For more information, visit the webpage: https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA22158/ and the project webpage: https://micropbiomes.eu/