Panor-Omics-Based Design of Next Generation Biofertilizers for Sustainable Agriculture

The world’s increasing population currently faces urgent challenges such as environmental contamination, biodiversity impoverishment, climate change and food security. To address these challenges we will require, through a more sustainable agriculture approach, rising crop yields using fewer inputs. It is well known that plant microbiomes include beneficial bacteria that play a crucial role in plant health and growth. These plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) exhibit beneficial effects on plant growth, antagonize disease-causing microbes, improve nutrient availability and assimilation, and increase plant tolerance and resistance to biotic and abiotic stressors.

Microorganisms that play critical roles can be isolated, identified, characterized, formulated and customized to develop new biofertilizers. Regardless of the approach used, innovation involving and harnessing the potential use of soil microbiomes represents the future of sustainable agriculture and is probably a long-term solution to the challenges mentioned above.

Despite the significant amount of generated knowledge in this area, the rational engineering of plant microbiomes for sustainable agriculture requires understanding the intricate complexity of plant–microbiome interactions, solving environmental variability issues, increasing the cultivability of beneficial microbes, translating laboratory findings to field applications and expanding research to non-model species through panoramic analytical methodologies such as omics.

Therefore, in this Special Issue articles (original research papers, opinions, reviews, modeling approaches and methods) that focus on the development of plant microbiomes for sustainable agriculture based on individual or multiomic approaches, comprising genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, culturomics, field trials and agronomics in model and non-model plants, are welcome.

Dr. José Antonio Carrasco López
Prof. Dr. Eloísa Pajuelo Domínguez
Guest Editors

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• sustainable agriculture
• plant microbiome engineering
• multi-omics
• panor-omics
• biofertilizers
• PGPB