Center Agriculture Food Environment (C3A) University of Trento – Fondazione Edmund Mach San Michele all’Adige, ITALY
Tuesday 17 December 2019 |12:00 noon – ICGEB Trieste, ITALY
Understanding of plant-microbe communications for a sustainable agriculture
Host: V. Venturi
Plants host complex microbial communities that can impact plant growth and health. The taxonomic structure of plant-associated microorganisms can be influenced by environmental, nutritional and agronomic factors, indicating that the plant microbiota can be partially engineered. Moreover, intense communications occurs between plant-associated microorganisms and they can influence the plant reaction to biotic and abiotic stresses. The aim of our studies is to provide new approaches for a more sustainable agriculture, based on a better understanding of microbial population equilibrium and plant-microbe communications. We investigated the impact of disease management strategies on fungal and bacterial communities associated to crop plants and we developed tools to engineer indigenous phyllosphere populations by the application of selected nutritional factors. Moreover, microbe-plant and plant-plant communications mediated by volatile organic compounds were investigated in order to control phytopathogenic infections.