Bioprospecting Soil-Plant Health Management in Horticultural Crops

Dear Colleagues,

Microbes playing multifarious roles have opened a floodgate of opportunities in horticultural crops requiring marketable quality production fit for preferred consumer acceptance coupled with extended shelf life to redefine crop production economics. Academic gains imparting field utility on precision and functional microbes are likely to perch modern day horticulture without unwanted use of agrochemicals via a better understanding of metagenomics-driven culture independent microbes. The microbial diversity, thus, previously confined to different microbial niches, has now reached beyond simple agronomic responses to add newer insights in terms of nutrient dynamics, readjusting the microbial fabric of rhizosphere as well as the endosphere to regulate secondary metabolites’ synthesis for plant health endurance, suppressing post-harvest diseases and expanding ecosystem services as environmental carbon offset avenues. These issues also substantiate a rather juvenile concept of soil health and plant health (through better revelations on networking strategies between soil microbes and plant endophytes) to complement each other to harvest the full potential of the existing microbial whirlpool and eventually develop microbes that help toward a more sustainable production system of horticultural crops. This Special Issue is proposed to address some of these intriguing issues still ailing horticultural crops.

Dr. Anoop Kumar Srivastava
Dr. Popy Bora
Guest Editors

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• phytobiome diversity
• functional analysis and sequencing
• microbial interactions and upscaling to consortia formulation
• plant health evaluation through secondary metabolite profiling
• plant defense and crop performance
• carbon footprints and microbial response
• savings on chemical fertilizers
• soil nutrient pool