From the Lab to the Farm: An Industrial Perspective of Plant Beneficial Microorganisms.

Any successful strategy aimed at enhancing crop productivity with microbial products ultimately relies on the ability to scale at regional to global levels. Microorganisms that show promise in the lab may lack key characteristics for widespread adoption in sustainable and productive agricultural systems. This paper provides an overview of critical considerations involved with taking a strain from discovery to the farmer's field. In addition, we review some of the most effective microbial products on the market today, explore the reasons for their success and outline some of the major challenges involved in industrial production and commercialization of beneficial strains for widespread agricultural application. General processes associated with commercializing viable microbial products are discussed in two broad categories, biofertility inoculants and biocontrol products. Specifically, we address what farmers desire in potential microbial products, how mode of action informs decisions on product applications, the influence of variation in laboratory and field study data, challenges with scaling for mass production, and the importance of consistent efficacy, product stability and quality. In order to make a significant impact on global sustainable agriculture, the implementation of plant beneficial microorganisms will require a more seamless transition between laboratory and farm application. Early attention to the challenges presented here will improve the likelihood of developing effective microbial products to improve crop yields, decrease disease severity, and help to feed an increasingly hungry planet.

Microclimate impacts survival and prevalence of Phytophthora ramorum in Umbellularia californica, a key reservoir host of sudden oak death in Northern California forests.

Phytophthora ramorum, an invasive pathogen and the causal agent of Sudden Oak Death, has become established in mixed-evergreen and redwood forests in coastal northern California. While oak and tanoak mortality is the most visible indication of P. ramorum's presence, epidemics are largely driven by the presence of bay laurel (Umbellularia californica), a reservoir host that supports both prolific sporulation in the winter wet season and survival during the summer dry season. In order to better understand how over-summer survival of the pathogen contributes to variability in the severity of annual epidemics, we monitored the viability of P. ramorum leaf infections over three years along with coincident microclimate. The proportion of symptomatic bay laurel leaves that contained viable infections decreased during the first summer dry season and remained low for the following two years, likely due to the absence of conducive wet season weather during the study period. Over-summer survival of P. ramorum was positively correlated with high percent canopy cover, less negative bay leaf water potential and few days exceeding 30°C but was not significantly different between mixed-evergreen and redwood forest ecosystems. Decreased summer survival of P. ramorum in exposed locations and during unusually hot summers likely contributes to the observed spatiotemporal heterogeneity of P. ramorum epidemics.

Weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) applied to the tomato fruit metabolome.

BACKGROUND: Advances in "omics" technologies have revolutionized the collection of biological data. A matching revolution in our understanding of biological systems, however, will only be realized when similar advances are made in informatic analysis of the resulting "big data." Here, we compare the capabilities of three conventional and novel statistical approaches to summarize and decipher the tomato metabolome. METHODOLOGY: Principal component analysis (PCA), batch learning self-organizing maps (BL-SOM) and weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) were applied to a multivariate NMR dataset collected from developmentally staged tomato fruits belonging to several genotypes. While PCA and BL-SOM are appropriate and commonly used methods, WGCNA holds several advantages in the analysis of highly multivariate, complex data. CONCLUSIONS: PCA separated the two major genetic backgrounds (AC and NC), but provided little further information. Both BL-SOM and WGCNA clustered metabolites by expression, but WGCNA additionally defined "modules" of co-expressed metabolites explicitly and provided additional network statistics that described the systems properties of the tomato metabolic network. Our first application of WGCNA to tomato metabolomics data identified three major modules of metabolites that were associated with ripening-related traits and genetic background.

Abscisic acid in salt stress predisposition to phytophthora root and crown rot in tomato and chrysanthemum.

Plants respond to changes in the environment with complex signaling networks, often under control of phytohormones that generate positive and negative crosstalk among downstream effectors of the response. Accordingly, brief dehydration stresses such as salinity and water deficit, which induce a rapid and transient systemic increase in levels of abscisic acid (ABA), can influence disease response pathways. ABA has been associated with susceptibility of plants to bacteria, fungi, and oomycetes but relatively little attention has been directed at its role in abiotic stress predisposition to root pathogens. This study examines the impact of brief salinity stress on infection of tomato and chrysanthemum roots by Phytophthora spp. Roots of plants in hydroponic culture exposed to a brief episode of salt (sodium chloride) stress prior to or after inoculation were severely diseased relative to nonstressed plants. Tomato roots remained in a predisposed state up to 24 h following removal from the stress. An increase in root ABA levels in tomato preceded or temporally paralleled the onset of stress-induced susceptibility, with levels declining in roots prior to recovery from the predisposed state. Exogenous ABA could substitute for salt stress and significantly enhanced pathogen colonization and disease development. ABA-deficient tomato mutants lacked the predisposition response, which could be restored by complementation of the mutant with exogenous ABA. In contrast, ethylene, which exacerbates disease symptoms in some host-parasite interactions, did not appear to contribute to the predisposition response. Thus, several lines of evidence support ABA as a critical and dominant factor in the salinity-induced predisposition to Phytophthora spp. infection.