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The phytobiome and biological control: What does the future hold?
Jan Leach: Colorado State University
<div>Meeting demands for food, feed and fiber will require doubling production in less than 35 years, and doing so in the face of increasing resource constraints, extreme weather events, uncertain water availability, and increasingly limited arable land. The Phytobiomes Roadmap, published in 2016, offered a vision for sustainable crop productivity obtained through a systems-level understanding of diverse interacting components. One component of the phytobiome that is being actively targeted for improving healthy crop production is the plant microbiome.<span> </span>Strategies involve the incorporation of beneficial microbiomes into agricultural systems by managing, selecting, or engineering microbiomes that enhance plant growth, nutrient use efficiency, tolerance to abiotic stresses, or disease resistance, including biological control. However, there are many knowledge gaps that need to be closed to successfully and sustainably translate this information to the field; these gaps and strategies to approach them will be discussed in this presentation. </div>

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