The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award is co-funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and by the Ecosystem Studies Program in the Division of Environmental Biology.
This award will support a twelve-month research fellowship by Dr. Allison L. H. Jack to work with Dr. Jos Raaijmakers at the Wageningen University Research Center in Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Managing soil organic matter inputs to create and maintain a soil's ability to protect plants from disease even when the pathogen is present is a crucial aspect of sustainable agriculture. However, in order to effectively manage this biological phenomenon, we must first understand how it works. Novel DNA-based techniques in microbial ecology have enabled detailed analyses of the bacteria associated with the suppression of plant pathogens. The high level of complexity inherent in soil microbial communities has historically limited these detailed studies to a single substrate and plant host. Important unanswered questions in this field require a comparison of taxa and genes associated with suppression across a range of substrates and plant hosts. Seed colonizing microbial communities are less complex than those in rhizosphere soil by several orders of magnitude and are implicated in the suppression of Pythium spp. I propose to use a simplified plant-associated microbial community in the form of seed-colonizing bacteria during early stages of germination in order to compare a range of substrates and hosts. A combination of metagenomic and metatranscriptomic analyses carried out on seed-colonizing communities will allow me to answer the following questions; 1) Is there a core seed colonizing bacterial community that characterizes disease suppression across a range of substrates? And 2) Is there a core transcriptome for suppressive seed colonizing bacterial species shared among multiple substrates?
This research will help generate practical tools for sustainable agriculture where predicting and managing soil suppressiveness has historically been difficult. Being able to effectively harness soil biodiversity for natural suppression of plant pathogens would contribute to reductions in pesticide use, which has both human and environmental health benefits. The unique approach used in this proposed study could be adopted for many pathosystems in both natural and agroecosystems. In addition, having the opportunity to collaborate with a lead international researcher in this field would allow the PI to broaden her professional network and achieve her goal of co-organizing and participating in cross-institutional international studies on the microbial ecology of disease suppressive soils. Spending time in the Netherlands' Food Valley will allow her to observe how government, universities and private companies work together to create a thriving agri-food sector that contributes substantially to the national economy. As a PI at either a research university or the USDA ARS, she would like to assist in re-creating the success of the Dutch model in the US by participating in industry-university collaborations and enterprise development initiatives throughout my career.
In addition to the practical benefits to agriculture through enhancing our understanding of disease suppressive soils, this research will help develop new international collaboration between the PI and research groups at Wageningen University Research Center (Prof. Jos Raaijmakers), the Plant-Microbe Interactions Group at the University of Utrecht (Dr. Peter Bakker) and Cornell University, Ithaca, NY USA (Prof. Eric Nelson).
