Manipulating the plant phyllosphere microbiome for plant and environmental health.

Healthy plants, like all higher organisms, host an extensive commensal microbial community or microbiome. Non-pathogenic microbes in many cases benefit the host. In plants, both the leaf microbiome, the phyllosphere, and the root microbiome, the rhizosphere, contain a wide range of bacterial and fungal species, including some that have been shown to play a range of roles in disease prevention. Changes in the microbiome can, therefore, have important effects on plant health and microbial supplementation offers a real option for biological pesticides as part of a route to improved agricultural sustainability. However, understanding the rules of establishment of microbial supplements within the microbiome is currently a key knowledge gap, with many potential biological control agents failing to establish in the field under real agricultural conditions.

One area of particular interest in this respect is the dynamic nature of the microbiome. Microbial communities are subject to rapid change in composition, particularly true in the phyllosphere microbial community. The phyllosphere is the site of much plant pest and pathogenic invasion, making the phyllosphere microbiome key in defence. The phyllosphere is also a zone in which microbiome engineering can be relatively performed via application of synthetic communities (SynComs). Despite this, the phyllosphere has received much less focus than the rhizosphere.

This project will focus on characterising the dynamic nature of the phyllosphere microbiome. The composition of the phyllosphere microbial community is regulated by the exudates from the plant which are linked to plant metabolism. Our preliminary data provides strong evidence for circadian regulation of the phyllosphere microbiome, consistent with changes in plant metabolism. The project will fully characterise these dynamics via a metabarcoding approach to analyse the impact of time of day on the community structure and composition. Application of SynComs generated from microbes isolated at specific times of day will also allow investigation of the importance of this regulation within the microbiome for plant health and resilience.

The project forms a collaboration between primary supervisor, Dr Paul Devlin, who has extensive experience in the field of plant microbiome analysis and circadian biology, and Prof. Alessandra Devoto an expert in plant-microbe interaction and plant stress resilience.

We are looking for applicants with a broad background in biology and an interest in sustainable agriculture, eDNA and bioinformatic analysis with an upper second-class degree or equivalent.

To apply follow link and instructions at https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/applying/postgraduate/how-to-apply/. Please indicate supervisor’s last name "Devlin" and project title in your application.