Microbial Community Assembly and Diversity: Implications for Sustainable Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

Microbes are one of the finest natural resources for sustainable agriculture and play a crucial role in ecosystem-based adaptations during disturbances due to global climate change. The plant rhizosphere attracts a diverse community of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes, and viruses, which live on the surface, inside, and on their tissues, contributing to the development of the plant–soil–microbiome.

Microbial communities can promote plant health in various mechanisms, including growth promotion, stress regulation, and even pathogenic in nature. Soil microbial communities are efficient in management of complex crop residues organic substances into simple inorganic available nutrients. The soil methanotrophs microbiome consumes potent greenhouse gas methane and minimizes global warming effects. The next-generation microbiome engineering with efficient microbial community-based dynamics and with cutting-edge biotechnological tools such as microbial inoculants, synthetic communities, genome editing, innovative bio-fertilizers, and multiomics-driven approaches will significantly promote crop performance under climate change.

This Special Issue will present the latest research and technological developments in the field of plant microbiome, microbial community architecture, and functional dynamics in sustainable agriculture under climate change. It will include different aspects of soil–plant–microbe interaction, microbiome in crop growth promotion and restoration ecology, microbial community shift due to land use changes, soil microbes in greenhouse gases mitigation, microbes in biotic and abiotic stress mitigation, phytohormone synthesis and signalling, efficient microbial community and functional diversity in minimizing the soil and environmental pollution load, etc. We welcome critical reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and original descriptive or applied research.

Dr. Jay Shankar Singh
Guest Editor

Dr. Shobhit Raj Vimal
Guest Editor Assistant

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