Figure 1: Proposed technical flow for artificial construction of a synthetic microbial community

Throughout the past few decades, the world has changed in a myriad of ways. Although the Green revolution was able to solve many problems that existed such as poverty and hunger, a lot of negative impacts to the environment and humans were caused in massive amounts. In the current world, the biggest problem we face is the growing population and having not enough land for the future living and growing food crops. It is estimated that the human population will nearly be 9.7 billion by the year 2050.
Therefore, search for novel approaches to fulfill human requirements without harming Mother Nature is of utmost importance. One novel trend used by the present scientific world is the use of different connections between microbes and plants for agricultural systems.
Different techniques that are used to enhance the sustainability of agro ecosystems will be discussed in this article.
There are several multi-omics approaches used to reveal the composition of the microbes, microbial networks in which they are present, and their functions.
One such approach is the iTAG sequencing studies which are known as high-throughput sequencing using marker gene tags such as 16s rRNA for bacteria and 18srRNA for fungus. They are used for taxonomical findings via use of nifh, amoA as the functional genes. By using these iTAG sequencing, crop-based research were done for crops such as rice, millet, corn, barley, soybeans, and many more, which proved that there were microorganisms living in those plants.
Since these iTAG-based studies supply limited information, approaches such as shotgun sequencing is more applicable due to the supply of more information about the total DNA content while identifying related genomic features of colonization with plants and their interactions with the microorganism.
Meta-transcriptomics, meta-proteomics, and metabolomics are the other techniques that reveal huge, myriad of important information about the microbiota, including kingdom-level active microbes in the rhizosphere, molecular phenotypes of the rhizosphere microbes, and diagnosis of different plant diseases. These studies lead to the production of biosensors of drought stress by using these microbial communities.
For commercial inventions, bacteria culturing is of paramount importance. Culturomics has come to the stage now, and to enhance that procedure, micro droplet and microfluidics technologies can be used.
Bioinformatics tools have revealed another important microbial network and it is called hub microbes. They play an important role in the plant-microbe interaction and support the network structure.
The above methods give us extremely important information about microorganisms. They assist in designing different techniques to combine those microorganisms to enhance the sustainability of agro ecosystems. As an example, to increase plant performance, host beneficial traits can be assembled with a microbial community and it is known as host-mediated microbiome engineering. Some soil bacteria have the ability to develop resistance against above-ground herbivorous insects for their plants which can also be used as a pest control method. Biocontrol agents and different formulations too are popular approaches across the globe. There should be a clear conscious idea about the microbial potential for enhancing the productivity of the targeted field and the environment.
The above technologies lead to a strong trajectory to enhance the productivity of the crops, fields and ultimately to give rise to a sustainable agro ecosystem.

Reference:
Trivedi, P., Mattupalli, C., Eversole, K. and Leach, J.E. (2021), Enabling sustainable agriculture through understanding and enhancement of microbiomes. New Phytol, 230: 2129-2147. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.17319