Project Description: The project is one of three projects funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation under the Collaborative Crop Resilience Program. This is an international collaboration between NC State, The University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and the Technical Univ. of Denmark. The goal of these projects is to take a systems-level view of plants and their interactions with microbes in the soil, roots and foliage to improve plant health and productivity. This is particularly important in the face of climate change and emerging pathogens and pests where leveraging microbes to help plants avoid stresses while acquiring nutrients to reduce fertilizer, pesticide and irrigation become important. Our lab is developing multiscale models across biological scales that can predict the contribution of key plant and microbe interactions, which mediate intra- and inter-organismic resource allocation and promote plant fitness and resilience.
Contributors: Max Gordan.