Plants sustain trillions of different microbes in and outside of their roots. These microbes are defined as “the second genome” of their hosts and play important roles in plant growth and health. In our laboratory, we focus on plant microbiome functions in controlling soilborne diseases, conferring salt tolerance, and promoting nutrient uptake of potatoes by mainly using metagenomic sequencing, metabolomics analysis, gene editing, microbial cultivation and engineering.

Potato is the third most common food crop in the world after wheat and rice. It feeds a big part of the global population in the next years. This crop has great economical values, however, (1) numerous diseases, mainly refer to the soilborne diseases here, can cause severe damage and huge losses in the production. Soilborne diseases that affect potato development. The complexity of the interactions between potato crop and the pathogens makes the control of the diseases often very difficult. Since soilborne diseases are persistent problems in potato production and alternative management practices are needed, where sustainable disease control methods remain limited. (2) Reinventing potato from a clonally propagated tetraploid into a seed-propagated diploid, is an important innovation in agriculture. True potato seeds cultivation will face new challenges in improving nutrient uptake, especially in the seedling stage. (3) To enhance the beneficial effects of the “Good” microbiome members in agricultural practice, more and more researchers switched their focuses from the study of “one microbe at a time” to “construction of synthetic microbial communities (SynCom)”. However, how SynCom members interact with local microbiome and communicate between each other remains unclear. Therefore, in our laboratory, our key research directions were established as follow:

1.Root associated microbiome suppress potato soilborne diseases

2.Microbiome promotes potato nutrient uptake

3.Crosstalk of bacterial strains in functional microbial communities