By Lindsey Becker, 2018-2021 FFAR Fellow
Plants, like all living things, have co-evolved along with microbes. Plants are complex ecosystems for microbes, where every part of the plant and every surface can host and be shaped by a distinct community of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microorganisms.
While we have known for centuries that these microbes exist, only in the last few decades have researchers been able to understand the microbial communities associated with plants by identifying key species and estimating their abundance. We now know that there are microbial communities, “microbiomes,” that are intimately linked to different species of plants.