Research areas addressed in this Priority Programme:

Ecological and molecular mechanisms of community establishment, community dynamics, including disease resistance and resilience, and microbial physiology in a community context. Goals are:

• To identify keystone species and key processes involved in the assembly of plant microbiota
• To test the contribution of plant-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions to community assembly and microbiota-influenced host traits
• To test assembly of plant microbiota under a broad range of environmental conditions in controlled experiments
• To identify mechanisms underlying plant-microbiota resilience to genetic, nutritional and/or environmental perturbations
• To elucidate processes by which plants discriminate between pathogens and beneficial microbes in a community context
• To establish how variation in innate immunity recognition and signalling influences microbial community structure and function
• To test whether microbe-microbe interactions and community patterns observed in simplified systems are reflected in observations from natural or agricultural systems

Collective toolkit development. Goals are:

• To expand the toolkit for computational pipelines for meta-genomics, meta-transcriptomics, network construction and genome mining
• To expand the toolkit for examining responses to biotic and abiotic stresses
• To establish plant and microbial mutant libraries for mechanistic studies