By Yunqing Wang, 2023-2026 FFAR Fellow
at the California Institute of Technology
Beneath every crop lies a dynamic and invisible ecosystem that plays a vital role in agriculture: the rhizosphere. Microbial communities in this zone drive nutrient cycling, influence greenhouse gas emissions and impact plant productivity. Yet, despite their central role in ecosystem health, we lack the tools to monitor their activity in real time and at scale.
As a FFAR Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, I am developing a sentinel plant platform to serve as a living biosensor to enable aboveground detection of microbial gene activity in the soil. The vision is to create a system that functions like a “molecular window” into the rhizosphere – similar to how Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) revolutionized cellular biology by allowing scientists to track gene expression and protein activity inside the cell.