IBH Seminar | Barley Microbes: Their responses to perturbations & environmental gradients

The International Barley Hub is pleased to announce the next in the 2024 series of seminars: 'Barley Microbes: Their responses to perturbations & environmental gradients' presented by Tancredi Caruso from University College Dublin.
Speaker Bio
Tancredi Caruso is Associate Professor of Ecology at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the processes that structure soil biodiversity in space and time and he has mostly worked on aboveground-belowground linkages, especially plants and soil biota, and the ecological networks they form, and how the networks respond to environmental change and perturbations.
Summary
This talk presents the first results of the study of the rhizosphere microbiota of 10 genotypes of barley representative of various breeding histories (landraces, heritage cultivars, elite cultivars) with an emphasis on the network of associations formed by barley and microbes. The motivation for this study stems from the fact that rhizosphere microbiota is nowadays recognised to be central to agrobiology. We hypothesised that barley genotypes differ in how they recruit and interact with microbes in the rhizosphere and that those differences are related to how barley responds and recovers from perturbations such as flooding or heat stress. Our first data suggest a core-periphery structure in which the main hub consists of a core microbiome shared by all genotypes but where the periphery is critical to how each genotype responds to perturbation (flooding for the data presented in the talk). I will highlight what is next in our project to broadly discuss the state-of-the-art and possible ways forward for a more comprehensive understanding of agroecosystem biodiversity in barley and more generally crops, including their microbial components.