“What I cannot create, I do not understand": elucidating microbe–microbe interactions to facilitate plant microbiome engineering

Alexander M. Geller, Asaf Levy

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Plant–microbe interactions are important for both physiological and pathological processes. Despite the significance of plant–microbe interactions, microbe–microbe interactions themselves represent an important, complex, dynamic network that warrants deeper investigation. To understand how microbe–microbe interactions affect plant microbiomes, one approach is to systematically understand all the factors involved in successful engineering of a microbial community. This follows the physicist Richard Feynman's declaration: “what I cannot create, I do not understand”. This review highlights recent studies that focus on aspects that we believe are important for building (ergo understanding) microbe–microbe interactions in the plant environment, including pairwise screening, intelligent application of cross-feeding models, spatial distributions of microbes, and understudied interactions between bacteria and fungi, phages, and protists. We offer a framework for systematic collection and centralized integration of data of plant microbiomes that could organize all the factors that can help ecologists understand microbiomes and help synthetic ecologists engineer beneficial microbiomes.

Original languageAmerican English
Article number102283
JournalCurrent Opinion in Microbiology
Volume72
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
AL is generously supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (Grants #1535/20 , #3300/20 , #3062/20 ), Alon Fellowship of the Israeli Council of Higher Education , The Hebrew University — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign seed grant, the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture (Grant 12-12-0002 ), ICA in Israel, Bayer-Trendlines , and The Volkswagen Foundation . AMG was previously supported by the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and integration and is currently generously supported by Kaete Klausner fellowship.

Funding Information:
AL is generously supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (Grants #1535/20, #3300/20, #3062/20), Alon Fellowship of the Israeli Council of Higher Education, The Hebrew University — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign seed grant, the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture (Grant 12-12-0002), ICA in Israel, Bayer-Trendlines, and The Volkswagen Foundation. AMG was previously supported by the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and integration and is currently generously supported by Kaete Klausner fellowship.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Elsevier Ltd

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