PhD position Mechanisms underlying plant-root microbiome recruitment under stress

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In this PhD position you will use experimental data and data integration approaches to unravel causal relations in plant-microbiome interactions under stress.

Plant roots house one of the most diverse microbial communities on Earth. Potentially these can be used to improve stress resilience of crops and enable sustainable food production. In collaboration with company partner Keygene you will look for relations between plant genotype and microbiome functionality changes under stress. You will collect experimental data on how a lack of phosphorus results in changes in gene expression, root exudate metabolite composition and microbiome recruitment in tomato. From these data, using advanced data integration approaches and causal relationship analyses, you will look for evidence of decision points and trade-offs in changes in microbiome recruitment. The selection of gene candidates will be further supported by a GWAS experiment in which you will look for genomic associations for microbiome recruitment in tomato. Gene candidates will be verified using mutants and/or Virus Induced Gene Silencing.

What are you going to do?

You are expected:

• to study the effect of phosphate starvation on plant root microbiome recruitment;
• to analyse causal relations between changes in gene expression, root exudate metabolite composition and microbiome composition and function;
• to analyse the trade-off between recruitment of the microbiome and other P-starvation responses;
• to supervise bachelor and master students.

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