Project description
Toolkit of symbiotic bacteria based on gene clusters coding stress-resilient traits
Climate change is causing increasingly severe droughts, heat waves and plant diseases, threatening global food security. Soil bacteria that help plants withstand stress are a promising route to climate-resilient agriculture but current microbial cocktails of synthetic communities often fail under real field conditions. Simultaneously, vast genomic datasets linking bacterial genes to plant-beneficial traits remain underutilised. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SYNBIONT project aims to mine these datasets to identify gene clusters associated with stress resilience and engineer them into a versatile bacterial toolkit. This rational, mechanism-driven approach could deliver programmable, field-compatible microbial tools to protect crops against multiple simultaneous climate stresses.
Objective
Climate change is undermining global food security through intensifying droughts, heat waves, and plant diseases. Microbial symbionts are increasingly recognized as key allies for climate-resilient agriculture, yet current approaches based on synthetic communities (SynComs) often fail under field conditions due to ecological instability. In parallel, comparative genomics has generated vast datasets linking host- and trait-associations for tens of thousands of bacterial genes, resources that remain largely untapped for rational symbiont design.
The SYNBIONT project will harness these datasets to identify “trait cassettes”, gene clusters enriched in plant-associated bacteria and correlated with enhanced resilience to (a)biotic stresses. These cassettes will be integrated into Pseudomonas putida KT2440 (P. putida), followed by controlled Arabidopsis thaliana (A. thaliana) experiments under defined stress regimes. Validated resilience-associated genes will be combined into P. putida carrying 3-5 cassettes, engineered to cope with multiple simultaneous stresses, and benchmarked against traditional SynComs.
Integrated phenotypic, transcriptional, metabolic, and physiological analyses will establish causal links between trait cassettes and plant resilience. This approach shifts the field from correlative observations to mechanism-driven, programmable symbionts. Key deliverables include: (i) a validated “PlantFit” atlas of trait-specific genes for stress resilience, (ii) a library of modular, ready-to-use cassettes for rapid deployment, and (iii) engineered P. putida chassis strains for mechanistic studies and translational agriculture.
My expertise in synthetic biology and functional genomics, combined with the host lab’s strengths in comparative genomics and plant-microbe experimentation, provide the ideal foundation to execute this transformative, interdisciplinary project, as well as translate findings from A. thaliana into crops.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology bacteriology
- natural sciences biological sciences synthetic biology
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology climatic changes
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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29016 MALAGA
Spain
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