Harnessing beneficial soil microbiota promoting grapevine resilience against grapevine trunk diseases

With ongoing global warming, newly emerging diseases have become a serious challenge for food security. Grapevine trunk diseases (GTDs), first reported in Spain in the 12th century, have posed an increasing threat to viticulture over the past two decades. Previous research at the Nick lab has shown that under climate-born stress, the disease outbreak of GTDs can be controlled through chemical communication between the host and GTDs-related fungi, where phenylpropanoid pathway allocation to bioactive stilbenes could control the disease spread. On the other hand, allocating phenylalanine towards the lignin precursor, ferulic acid, could switch GTDs to an aggressive phase killing the vines robustly (Khattab et al., 2022; 2023). The current project aims to harness the beneficial soil microbes that promote grapevine resilience against GTDs, either by activating bioactive stilbenes synthesis or directly suppressing the growth rate of GTDs fungi. Using molecular and cellular aspects, candidate soil microbiota from preliminary work either fungal taxa, e.g. g_Sordaria and g_Funneliformis, or bacterial taxa from p_Bacillota and p_Bactoroidota will be studied to map their potential crosstalk in inhibiting the GTDs. This approach would act as an immediate approach for sustainable resilient viticulture against GTDs.