Phytobiomes Alliance: Convergent Research & Regulatory Science Activities

Posted 20th December 2019 by Joshua Sewell

Kellye Eversole told us that “a major paradigm shift in agricultural production is required to meet the demands of a global world population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050. We have to increase crop productivity sustainably while preserving biodiversity, natural resources, and grower income in the context of climate change.”

At the 4^th Partnerships in Biocontrol, Biostimulants & Microbiome Congress: USA, Kellye explained more about the Phytobiome Alliance: a nonprofit consortium of industry, academic, and governmental scientists seeking to meet this challenge and promote this paradigm shift. The principle of the alliance is to move from a simple and reductionistic to a complex and systems approach to agriculture.

New technologies such as omics-enabling technologies and data, advances in computational science, precision agriculture and convergence science mean that we are now closer to the holy grail for plant production: “to understand, predict, and control emergent phenotypes within specific sites for the sustainable production of food, feed, and fibre”.

The priority of the Alliance is to provide scientific understanding to regulatory agencies so that they are able to execute effective regulatory reviews and enable efficient commercialization of microbial products for agriculture. Here is a summary from Kellye:

“In particular, the Alliance is working to understand the regulatory science needs of industry, academia, and governments. While we have already identified some of the gaps and are leading research to fill them, we aim to develop a broad, regulatory science roadmap that identifies further gaps, priorities, and opportunities for research. This roadmap will then be used to guide the development, funding, and implementation of research that could support changes or improvements in state, national, and international regulations.”