Extended: Patterns of Stress Resilience - Beneficial Microbes Tailoring Root Cells

Plants show remarkable resilience when facing singular challenges like floods, drought, or heatwaves, partially due to shifts in the structure of the individual cells in their roots. The extreme pace and impact of climate change highlight a demand for plants withstanding multiple stresses. Inducing adaptation in several root cell types simultaneously, is a potential route for increasing multi-stress resilience. While there is vast knowledge on mechanisms of individual adaptations, inducing multi-stress resilience in crops via genetics is challenging. Recently, we obtained first evidence that microbes can reshape several root cell types of crop species towards their stress-adaptive forms. We identified bacterial isolates that induced suberization of the endodermis and cortical aerenchyma formation in sorghum roots. Candidate bacterial taxa were also found to modulate the number and diameter of metaxylem vessels, as well as the number of cortex layers. This suggests that soil-borne bacteria can induce a plethora of phenotypes of potential stress-protective features. We currently aim to understand which set of microbes is required to induce optimal combinations of root cell-type-specific adaptations, what is the molecular mechanism of their action and their role in stress responses. This knowledge will open avenues to use microbes to induce multi-stress resilience in crops.