International Alliance for Phytobiomes Research

The Phytobiomes Alliance supported the novel microbiome technologies to increase profitability for australian horticulture (funded by hort innovation, australia), this project is developing and deploying new microbiome-based products that increase the yield and profitability of annual and perennial australian horticulture crops. The Phytobiomes Alliance executive director is an advisor of this project. The alliance-coordinated genome sequence-based classification system for microbes focused on the select agent ralstonia solanancearum. In this project, a classification system based on whole genome sequences was used to precisely identify microbes and conclusively distinguish between rs strains of high impact and biosecurity concern and those that are not. This project was completed december 2024 and is currently awaiting manuscript publication. The Phytobiomes Alliance's united states culture collection network (usccn) continued developing and promoting its online searchable registry of plant-associated microbial culture collections. Usccn also organized a workshop and two webinars during 2023. The Phytobiomes Alliance joined a large, transnational community of researchers and users on the microbe-4-climate (funded by the horizon europe program). The Phytobiomes Alliance worked on the proposal and received approval late in 2023 with a project start date of february 2024. This is a 5-year project. In 2023, the Phytobiomes Alliance organized six webinars covering topics such as: the need for a specimen management plan in project proposals, host-microbiota interactions in the barley rhizosphere, microbial community composition in hydro-ponic leafy green production, design strategies for altering microbial communities in the rhizosphere, host-microbe dynamics under biotic and antibiotic stresses. The Phytobiomes Alliance organized two workshops at the plant and animal genome conference, one workshop at the british society of animal science in birmingham, uk and two satellite workshops before the 12th International congress of plant pathology in lyon, france.