RCN: AgMicrobiomes: An Interdisciplinary Research Network to Advance Microbiome Science in Agriculture

Soil and plants support complex microbiomes composed of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Microbiomes are understood to have significant impacts on agricultural productivity, and have attracted enormous interest as the 'new frontier' for advancing capacities to sustainably produce sufficient food, feed, and fiber to meet the projected global population of 9 billion by 2050. However, our current understanding of the factors that influence the diversity, composition, and benefits of plant microbiomes is limited by a lack of systematic and comprehensive data on agricultural microbiomes across regional and continental scales. This project will establish the Agricultural Microbiomes Project (AMP), a global NSF Research Coordination Network (RCN) of scientists, research sites, and model cropping and plant systems focused on agricultural plant and soil microbes. Its broad goal is to advance our understanding of agricultural microbiomes and their relationships to plant productivity and sustainable crop production. The AMP will work to actively promote engagement and training of diverse researchers by providing opportunities for research collaborations and by offering scholarships for students and those from underrepresented demographics to participate in workshop-based education and training activities.

This RCN aims to provide the tools and human resources necessary to accelerate microbiome science and its applications to sustainable crop production. The specific objectives of the AMP RCN are to:

1. Establish an international network of agricultural microbiome researchers to facilitate and advance coordinated synthetic, collaborative, and integrative scientific studies of agricultural plant and soil microbiomes;

2. Leverage existing national and international long-term agricultural research sites and projects to create an intercontinental-scale agricultural microbiome research platform;

3. Enhance development of foundational concepts and training in agricultural microbiomes research through a series of workshops targeted towards researchers in the field, and via symposia that build connections and partnerships between agricultural microbiome research and work in critical related fields such as systems and synthetic biology, geographic information systems, and evolutionary biology; and,

4. Enhance understanding of plant microbiomes and plant-microbiome-environment interactions using model plants and cropping systems, while establishing strategies for applying and translating model system data towards practical management of agricultural microbiomes.

This RCN will significantly enhance collaborative and synthetic, cross-system research on soil and plant microbiomes, stimulate cross-disciplinary application of complex analytics for 'omics-based microbiome research, and provide the potential for continental-to-global scale microbiome analyses in agricultural systems.