Ensuring agricultural productivity and sustainability in a rapidly changing world requires innovative linkages between fundamental research and novel applications. In the context of climate change, loss of soil fertility and arable land, decreasing biodiversity resources, and increased reliance on core crops by a growing human population, there is an immediate need for new strategies to enhance crop plant resiliency, productivity, and nutritional quality. Breeding and plant biotechnology provide important tools for plant enhancement but do not take full advantage of the powerful toolkit embodied by plant microbiomes, which can be transferred as individual microbial species or whole microbial communities from wild plants to cultivated crops, and carry with them instant enhancement of plant resilience.
We are convergent, interdisciplinary scholars drawn to address the immediate grand challenge of improving agricultural sustainability in a world that is changing rapidly. In Arizona we have a front-row seat to vanishing water resources, environmental stresses on crops, and the need to sustain ecosystems on which humans depend. At the University of Arizona, we are poised uniquely to deliver solutions, urgently needed and grand-challenge in scope.
Our team began with a collaborative grant awarded by the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (iViP program) to Duke Pauli and Betsy Arnold, with a focus on sorghum microbiomes and their mitigation of plant phenotypes.
We have expanded to a cross-ecosystem perspective, with studies ranging from mosses at Biosphere2 to sorghum and lettuce at the Maricopa Agriculture Center, to plant communities in arid lands worldwide.
Our team includes Betsy Arnold and Duke Pauli (Plant Sciences), Scott Saleska and Katrina Dlugosch (EEB), Joost van Haren (Franke Honors College), Jana U'Ren (Biosystems Engineering), and Joe Bonito (Communications), with partners in industry and a terrific group of undergraduate and graduate students.
Please contact us to learn more about crop microbiomes, arid-land microbiomes, microbial communication, fungal symbionts of plants, endophytes of wild relatives of crop plants, and plant enhancement via microbial symbioses.
We are convergent, interdisciplinary scholars drawn to address the immediate grand challenge of improving agricultural sustainability in a world that is changing rapidly. In Arizona we have a front-row seat to vanishing water resources, environmental stresses on crops, and the need to sustain ecosystems on which humans depend. At the University of Arizona, we are poised uniquely to deliver solutions, urgently needed and grand-challenge in scope.
Our team began with a collaborative grant awarded by the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (iViP program) to Duke Pauli and Betsy Arnold, with a focus on sorghum microbiomes and their mitigation of plant phenotypes.
We have expanded to a cross-ecosystem perspective, with studies ranging from mosses at Biosphere2 to sorghum and lettuce at the Maricopa Agriculture Center, to plant communities in arid lands worldwide.
Our team includes Betsy Arnold and Duke Pauli (Plant Sciences), Scott Saleska and Katrina Dlugosch (EEB), Joost van Haren (Franke Honors College), Jana U'Ren (Biosystems Engineering), and Joe Bonito (Communications), with partners in industry and a terrific group of undergraduate and graduate students.
Please contact us to learn more about crop microbiomes, arid-land microbiomes, microbial communication, fungal symbionts of plants, endophytes of wild relatives of crop plants, and plant enhancement via microbial symbioses.