Rhizosphere immunity: targeting the underground for sustainable plant health management

Abstract

Managing plant health is a great challenge for modern food production and is further complicated by the lack of common ground between the many disciplines involved in disease control. Here we present the concept of rhizosphere immunity, in which plant health is considered as an ecosystem level property emerging from networks of interactions between plants, microbiota and the surrounding soil matrix. These interactions can potentially extend the innate plant immune system to a point where the rhizosphere immunity can fulfil all four core functions of a full immune system: pathogen prevention, recognition, response and homeostasis. We suggest that considering plant health from a meta-organism perspective will help in developing multidisciplinary pathogen management strategies that focus on steering the whole plant-microbe-soil networks instead of individual components. This might be achieved by bringing together the latest discoveries in phytopathology, microbiome research, soil science and agronomy to pave the way toward more sustainable and productive agriculture.

Keywords

rhizosphere / soil microbiome / plant immunity / microbial ecology / plant health / soilborne pathogens

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41922053, 41671248; ZW), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFD1000800; ZW), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities KYXK202009–KYXK202012, the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2015CB150503; QS). AJ is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research project ALW.870.15.050 and the H2020 project “Viroplant”. VPF is supported by Royal Society Research Grants (RSG\R1\180213 and CHL\R1\180031) at the University of York.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Zhong Wei, Ville-Petri Friman, Thomas Pommier, Stefan Geisen, Alexandre Jousset, and Qirong Shen declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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The Author(s) 2020. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)