Why can #AMF products disappoint? Often, three filters are confused: product viability, field responsiveness and crop genotype. The lesson is not that #microbials work or don’t - but that outcomes depend on quality control, diagnostics and genetic matching.

1/2 How can #CropWildRelatives help build more resilient and sustainable food systems? The new video of our #COUSINproject, coordinated by @schob.bsky.social shows 2.5 years of progress across Europe - conserving and using wild diversity to develop crops better adapted to climate change.

How do bacteria recognize fungal competitors? @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social by Lingfang Zhu (朱玲芳), Changfu Li (李长富), Xihui Shen (沈锡辉) www.cell.com/trends/micro...

How do bacteria recognize fungal competitors?

Bacterial–fungal interactions (BFIs) are central to microbial community dynamics in diverse ecosystems, with profound implications for medicine, agriculture, and environmental microbiology. A critical...

cell.com

After the “usual suspects” in pea root rot (shorturl.at/GRFYX), what appears when we scan the whole #RootMicrobiome? Pea genotype strongly shaped fungi and bacteria, revealing candidate disease and health biomarkers. Paper: @valentingfeller.bsky.social et al. 2025, Envir Microbiome

More mycorrhizae are not automatically better. For #PlantBreeding and #farming, the question might bot be about root colonisation, but whether AMF deliver a useful cost-benefit ratio. @mrillig.bsky.social @tobykiers.bsky.social Abundance is not efficiency. #AMF #Agroecology

Why do some #Trichoderma products work - while others disappoint? A useful strain is not enough. It must establish in roots, persist, and function there. That ecological proof is still often missing in #biologicals development - and exactly where BonaPlanta comes in.

🌱 New @cousinproject.bsky.social project video! From Wild Diversity to Resilient Agriculture highlights 2.5 years of progress using crop wild relatives to develop more resilient, sustainable crops for Europe. 🎬 Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/qxMsHNBcNNY

Video 1_COUSIN project: 2.5 Years of Progress and Impact

YouTube video by European Plant Science Organisation

youtu.be

El Máster en Agroecología y Agricultura Ecológica de la UB abre su edición 2026-2027. 📅 Sesión informativa online: 15 de julio, 19h: www.ub.edu/masterae/con... Yo daré una clase sobre la gestión de las micorrizas y otras simbiosis fúngicas en agricultura.

Here's our first concrete example on how microbial markers can be used in resistance #PlantBreeding. Main idea: many diseases are not single-pathogen problems, and breeding/diagnostics may benefit from looking at microbial key taxa (incl. beneficials), not only visual disease scores. #Microbiome

Is plant disease resistance just a plant trait? Or a #holobiont phenotype? The rhizosphere microbiome shouldn't be treated as background noise. It is a key driver of plant performance. Heritable microbial signatures could bridge the genome-to-phenome gap in crop breeding.

This week’s AI in Agriculture 🌱 📊 A recent ML study shows soil microbiome data alone poorly predict yield and disease. 💡 Signal appears mainly when combined with soil & environmental variables. ✅ Microbiomes amplify context, not replace it. 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Human limits in machine learning: prediction of potato yield and disease using soil microbiome data - BMC Bioinformatics

Background The preservation of soil health is a critical challenge in the 21st century due to its significant impact on agriculture, human health, and biodiversity. We provide one of the first compreh...

link.springer.com

Please share one last time! 📢 We’re hiring a #PostDoc @ub.edu! ❗Deadline's coming up: Nov 24 Join us to model soil health using ML of microbiome data. Join a creative team working towards sustainable ag & spin-off innovation 🚀 📅: Jan 2026 📍: Barcelona, Spain 🔗: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383350

Postdoc position in machine learning models for soil health prediction

The Agrobiology and Soil Management Group (University of Barcelona) invites applications for a 12-month postdoctoral position (part-time, 0.5 FTE) focused on developing and validating machine learning...

euraxess.ec.europa.eu

This week's special hot take! 💡 Microbes from dry-history soils boosted grass drought tolerance proving that soil microbiomes hold “climate memory”. ✅ Managing these legacies could aid crop resilience. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Precipitation legacy effects on soil microbiota facilitate adaptive drought responses in plants - Nature Microbiology

Metagenomes from prairie soils in Kansas, USA, show how historical exposure to water stress impacts soil microorganisms and subsequently drought responses in plants.

nature.com

🔹 Culinary training and research in collective catering (1:15 p.m.) With Dr. Marina Pérez Llorca, who will discuss how education and research drive innovation in this field. ℹ️ https://tuit.cat/Veuwz

A big day for European Soils www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/pres... #SoilHealth

Soil monitoring: Parliament adopts new EU law with better support for farmers | News | European Parliament

The new law will ensure soil is monitored in all EU countries and farmers get better support to improve soil health and soil resilience.

europarl.europa.eu

Check out the latest EU CAP Network #EIPAGRI newsletter featuring an interview I had with Daniel Suter, Head of Forage Crop Variety Testing @agroscope.bsky.social: sh1.sendinblue.com/15d9jpnd39tx... We elaborate how variety testing can boost species mixtures in #plantbreeding and farming.

Still using 16S/ITS profiling? You might want to reconsider👀 Our new paper presents pangenome-informed amplicons that provide up to 10× higher phylogenetic resolution than full-length ribosomal markers- while remaining cost effective and scalable! microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

High-resolution profiling of bacterial and fungal communities using pangenome-informed taxon-specific long-read amplicons - Microbiome

Background High-throughput sequencing technologies have greatly advanced our understanding of microbiomes, but resolving microbial communities at species and strain levels remains challenging. Results...

microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com

📢 We’re hiring! Pls help spread the word. Postdoc (50%, 12 months) @ub.edu in Barcelona to model soil health using ML of microbiome data. Join a creative team working towards sustainable ag & spin-off innovation 🚀 Start: Jan 2026 🔗 euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383350 #PostDoc #JobsInAcademia

Postdoc position in machine learning models for soil health prediction

The Agrobiology and Soil Management Group (University of Barcelona) invites applications for a 12-month postdoctoral position (part-time, 0.5 FTE) focused on developing and validating machine learning...

euraxess.ec.europa.eu

This week’s “AI in Agriculture” 🌱 📊 ML framework tackled microbiome data limits (dimensionality, compositionality, sparsity). ⚙️ Prospect: inside-out (hologenome breeding) + outside-in (SynCom design) + federated learning. 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #AIinAg

Harnessing artificial intelligence to decode the rhizosphere microbiome

The rhizosphere microbiome plays crucial roles in plant health by regulating nutrient cycling and enhancing stress resilience. However, due to its com…

sciencedirect.com

This week’s “AI in Agriculture” 🌱 📊 ML corrected NDVI for abiotic factors, then linked residuals to fungal microbiomes. ✅ Promising route to soil-microbiome early-warning systems. 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s432... #AIinAg #Microbiome #SoilHealth

Exploring crop health and its associations with fungal soil microbiome composition using machine learning applied to remote sensing data - Communications Earth & Environment

Crop health is improved by abundance of beneficial soil fungal genera and reduced by abundance of soil fungal pathogens, according to analysis of satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation ind...

doi.org

This week’s “AI in Agriculture” 🌱 📊 Universal ODE hybrid model predicted SOC change with R² ≈ 0.9999 in low-noise tests, with moisture, temperature & microbial turnover as key drivers. ⚠️ Sensitive to noisy data → needs uncertainty-aware training. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24306 #AIinAg #SoilCarbon

A study of Universal ODE approaches to predicting soil organic carbon

Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) is a foundation of soil health and global climate resilience, yet its prediction remains difficult because of intricate physical, chemical, and biological processes. In this ...

arxiv.org

Open position: Professor or Assistant / Associate (tenure track) Professor in Plant Ecology (U. Turku Finland) Please share ats.talentadore.com/apply/kasvie...

Professor or Assistant / Associate (tenure track) Professor in Plant Ecology

The Faculty of Science is looking for a full professor or assistant/associate professor (tenure track) in Plant Ecology. The aim of the professorship is to strengthen scientific research and education...

ats.talentadore.com

This week’s “AI in Agriculture” 🌱 📊 AgroLLM benchmarked LLMs with RAG on agri corpora → ChatGPT-4o Mini reached 93% accuracy, better than Gemini & Mistral ✅ Specialised LLMs may be a future of ag knowledge transfer 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2503.04788 #AIinAg #LLM #RAG

AgroLLM: Connecting Farmers and Agricultural Practices through Large Language Models for Enhanced Knowledge Transfer and Practical Application

AgroLLM is an AI-powered chatbot designed to enhance knowledge-sharing and education in agriculture using Large Language Models (LLMs) and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. By using a ...

arxiv.org

📢 PhD opening in Barcelona! Join our group. Research soil health and carbon cycling. Recent grad (2021-25) w/ > 8.5 grade & R/Python skills. Details: www.linkedin.com/posts/agrobi... #PhDJobs #AcademicJobs #PhDPosition

This week's "AI in Agriculture" 🌱 📊 Soil microbiome profiles analysed with random forest models predicted whether soils suppress Rhizoctonia solani ✅ Promising step towards microbiome-informed tools for soil health and biocontrol www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #AIinAg #Microbiome

Microbiome-driven machine learning for predicting suppressiveness to Rhizoctonia solani in organic-amended soils

This study introduces a microbiome-integrated machine learning framework to predict soil suppressiveness against Rhizoctonia solani, a destructive fun…

sciencedirect.com

This week's "AI/ML in Agriculture" hot take: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💡CWRs host microbes modern crops lost → relevant for resilience traits. ML helps model which pairings matter most. ✅ Fits with our @cousinproject.bsky.social, where we aim for microbiome-mediated trait transfers

Blueprints for sustainable plant production through the utilization of crop wild relatives and their microbiomes - Nature Communications

Authors discuss the potential of conserving crop wild relatives, together with the associated communities of microorganisms, to unlock strategies for improving crop resilience and achieving food secur...

nature.com

📢Oportunidad predoctoral en Barcelona: Investigación sobre efectos de la tinta de tatuajes durante su proceso de eliminación✒ 🎓Perfil: Graduado en Nutrición, Enfermería, Biología, Química, Farmacia o Medicina ✅Graduado entre 2021-25 ✅Nota media > 8.5 ✅Conocimientos Estadística (Stata/R)

Glad to be part of this team calling on global scientific and conservation communities to get on board to protect microbial life, which sustains all forms of life on our planet. in @natmicrobiol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔬🌱Our review “Roots: metabolic architects of beneficial microbiome assembly” led by PhD candidate Melissa Uribe Acosta @plantphys.bsky.social discusses plant mechanisms of root microbiome selection. Co-authors: @cornepieterse.bsky.social Jiayu Zhou Alberto Pascale. academic.oup.com/plphys/artic...

Roots: metabolic architects of beneficial microbiome assembly

Abstract. The increasing demand for sustainable agricultural practices has driven a renewed interest in plant–microbiome interactions as a basis for the ne

academic.oup.com

AI/ML in Agriculture - This week’s hot take 🌱 📊 Satellite crop health signals linked to soil fungal microbiomes 💡 Associations appear after adjusting for weather and soil ⚠️ For now: associations not causation ✅ Satellites guide, fungi explain! 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s43... #AIinAg #Microbiome

Exploring crop health and its associations with fungal soil microbiome composition using machine learning applied to remote sensing data - Communications Earth & Environment

Crop health is improved by abundance of beneficial soil fungal genera and reduced by abundance of soil fungal pathogens, according to analysis of satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation ind...

nature.com