The Role of Synthetic Microbial Communities (SynCom) in Sustainable Agriculture

Modern agriculture faces several challenges due to climate change, limited resources, and land degradation. Plant-associated soil microbes harbor beneficial plant growth-promoting (PGP) traits that can be used address some of these challenges. These are often formulated as inoculants for many crops. However, inconsistent productivity a problem since the performance individual inoculants/microbes vary with environmental conditions. Over past decade, ability utilize Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) approaches has led an explosion information regarding associated microbiomes. Although this type work been predominantly sequence-based descriptive in nature, increasingly it is moving towards microbiome functionality. The synthetic microbial communities (SynCom) approach emerging technique involves co-culturing multiple taxa under well-defined conditions mimic structure function microbiome. SynCom hopes increase community stability through synergistic interactions between its members. This review will focus on plant-soil-microbiome how they have potential improve crop production. Current formulation discussed, practical application considered.