Summary
This review addresses critical barriers preventing the translation of plant microbiome research into field-scale agricultural impact. The authors synthesise technical obstacles—including sequencing limitations for low-abundance taxa, multi-omics data integration, and microbial spatiotemporal variability—alongside regulatory, ethical and scalability challenges in adopting synthetic biology and artificial intelligence tools. The paper proposes a research roadmap emphasising benchmarked, field-validated workflows, interdisciplinary collaboration, and equitable global access to advance resilient, climate-smart and resource-efficient farming systems.
Regional applicability
The review's frameworks and roadmap are applicable to United Kingdom agriculture, particularly for addressing soil health and sustainable intensification priorities. However, specific field validation and adaptation to UK soil types, climates and regulatory contexts (e.g. Environmental Land Management schemes) would be required to implement the proposed workflows in UK farming systems.
Key measures
Not applicable to a review paper; focuses on measurement challenges including sequencing coverage, multi-omics integration, spatiotemporal variability in microbial dynamics, and standardisation of controls and workflows
Outcomes reported
The review synthesises current barriers to plant microbiome research adoption and identifies promising experimental and computational strategies. It proposes a roadmap for translating microbiome science into field-validated, climate-smart agricultural applications across diverse soils, genotypes and climates.
Topic tags
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