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Goals for Phytobiomes | Technical Needs |
Translational Outcomes |
- Define who is present and the relationships of phytobiome composition to plant productivity.
| - High throughput community profiling, phenotypic and environmental profiling, and metagenomics analyses
- Efficient approaches for meta-analyses of large numbers of genomic datasets
- Databases
| - Identify characteristics of healthy vs. nonadaptive phytobiomes
- Define core phytobiomes associated with consistent plant productivity, specific to distinct environments
- Determine targets for inoculant development, or for populations to suppress disease
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- Identify key drivers of phytobiome composition and dynamics.
| - Extensive correlative data and systematic experimental data from diverse habitats and environmental conditions
- Efficient approaches for integration and analysis of complex community data across diverse systems
| - Identify potential suite(s) of facotrs that may be targeted by field management
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- Determine the functional capacities of individual taxa and simple communities to alter plant productivity.
| - High-throughput plant phenotyping, including root systems
- High-throughput, in vivo/in planta microbial functional analyses and transcriptomics
| - Identify potential inoculant or inoculant mixtures
- Identify unexpected functional outcomes, and correlates of unexpected outcomes (e.g. taxonomic or functional characteristics of individual taxa or combinations of taxa that lead to better-than-expected, or poorer-than-expected, plant outcomes)
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- Characterize the emergent properties of phytobiomes.
| - System-biology approaches for analysis and prediction of complex community effects on individual microbial properties/phenotypes and on plant phenotypes
- High-throughput microbial and plant transcriptomics
| - Develop core principles for designing optimal synthetic microbiomes for maximizing plant productivity
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- Design novel approaches for managing phytobiomes to optimize plant productivity.
| - Efficient, reproducible, high-throughput field testing platforms
| - Integrate information from goals A-D to propose broad-based management solutions for agriculture
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All goals should be accomplished for diverse plant hosts across a broad range of habitats and environmental conditions, and every goal addresses multiple specific questions.
