Advances and New Perspectives in Plant-Microbe Interactions

Dear Colleagues,

Plants, due to their sessile nature, are constantly exposed to a myriad of microorganisms. Plant–microbe encounters can be friendly—beneficial—or hostile—harmful—depending on the interaction’s nature. Direct cooperative (symbiotic) plant–microbe relationships are dominant in many ecosystems. Synergistic interactions could determine crop health in the natural agroecosystem by providing numerous services to plants. By contrast, plants are also constantly exposed to fungal, bacterial, and/or viral pathogens, causing substantial economic losses, thereby leading to critical global food security pressure. As a result, in both relationships, a complex network of interactions has evolved within the plant–microbes—and unique defense mechanisms to fight infections—mediated by a multitude of chemicals signals derived from both plants and microbes. Therefore, deciphering the molecular work to reveal the principles/fundamental processes that orchestrate the plant–microbe interactions is of great interest. Additionally, new research dealing with genome editing technologies research, including newly emerged CRISPR/Cas systems, will be welcomed in the study of plant–microbe interactions. 

Additionally, plant–microbe interactions are profoundly affected by external environmental conditions. Understanding this “triangle” and how environmental conditions modulate plant–microbe interactions is crucial to predict the performance of plant–microbe interactions, engineering effective biofertilizers and/or biocontrol agents, and design “dream” crop plants with increased resilience or synthetic microbe communities for reproducible beneficial outputs to address today’s challenges in the realm of human population growth, globalization, and current and future climate change.

This Special Issue will bring together an exciting body of recent research, reviews, methods, and opinion pieces addressing the latest knowledge, relationships, and significance of plant–microorganism interactions in the ecosystem and in the development of human society, and how they might contribute toward the global goals of food security, sustainability, and wellbeing. We welcome suggestions from the community by 30 June 2022 for potential articles covering all advances and new perspectives of plant–microbe interaction research in the context of global change.

In particular, we welcome articles within (but not limited to) the following broad themes:

• Agriculture, horticulture, and forestry
• Molecular plant sciences
• Climate change
• Microbiology

Dr. Marouane Baslam
Guest Editor

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