The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institutes of Food and Agriculture have given grants to two Penn State led research teams in order to facilitate their research into how microorganisms can affect diseases when it comes to agriculture.
The first of these grants was given to Fabricio Vieira, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, which is part of the College of Agricultural Sciences. His project will be aimed at understanding the microbiome associated with the development of mushrooms and the suppression of diseases.
“Understanding agricultural developmental microbiomes—called devomes—has the potential to improve agricultural production systems, human well-being, and environmental health,” Vieira said. “We are studying a host that is economically and agriculturally important to Pennsylvania: Agaricus bisporus, the button mushroom that is commonly found in any grocery store.”
During the project, Vieira’s team will aim to identify which microbes and biochemicals are helpful to mushroom development and which suppress disease and look into the best ways to utilize those pathways. Once these microbiomes are identified, the team will attempt to establish how to best cultivate them in the substrate used to grow mushrooms.
As well as helping mushroom growers, there’s a high possibility that this research will help far beyond just commercial mushroom production. As Vieira said, “Fungi—including those with edible fruiting bodies—play a significant role in agronomic crop production, decomposition, nutrient cycling, and the reestablishment and stabilization of habitats through their services to plants and animals. Therefore, this project has the potential to improve our understanding of agricultural microbiomes as a whole.”
The second grant, while only being tangential to mushrooms, still has the potential to help with their growth and cultivation.
This grant was given to Francisco Dini-Andreote, who is the assistant professor of phytobiomes. His team’s research is focused on exploring the microbiome of soils that have natural abilities to suppress the growth of pathogens as well as infections. It will also investigate these soil’s resilience to agricultural practices and conditions.
This work is vital as soil-borne pathogens represent around 1,800 major crop diseases in the USA and lead to huge losses in food, fiber, and ornamental crop farming.
“There’s a diverse set of soil-borne pathogens that are difficult to control with conventional strategies, due to both chemical resistance and the pathogens developing ways to circumvent host resistance,” Dini-Andreote said. “With these challenges, efforts to develop alternative control measures are critical to alleviating the impacts of soil-borne pathogens while promoting a stable food supply system.”
The first pathogen under investigation will be Verticillium dahlia, a common fungus that attacks a wide range of plants. The project will identify types of soil that suppress its growth, as well as try to pinpoint what exactly suppresses it.
“Disease-suppressive soils are ideal systems for exploring novel microbial-mediated mechanisms of soil-borne pathogen control,” Dini-Andreote explained. “Discovering more about the metabolic potential of soil and plant-associated microbiomes to drive down soil-borne pathogens offers a sustainable strategy to reduce chemical inputs and increase crop protection in agroecosystems.”
