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Plant-microbe interactions are critical to ecosystem resilience and substantially influence crop production. From the perspective of plant science, two important focus areas concerning plant-microbe interactions include: 1) understanding plant molecular mechanisms involved in plant-microbe interfaces and 2) engineering plants for increasing plant disease resistance or enhancing beneficial interactions with microbes to increase their resilience to biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Molecular biology and genetics approaches have been used to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying plant responses to various beneficial and pathogenic microbes. While these approaches are valuable for elucidating the functions of individual genes and pathways, they fall short of unraveling the complex cross-talk across pathways or systems that plants employ to respond and adapt to environmental stresses. Also, genetic engineering of plants to increase disease resistance or enhance symbiosis with microbes has mainly been attempted or conducted through targeted manipulation of single genes/pathways of plants. Recent advancements in synthetic biology tool development are paving the way for multi-gene characterization and engineering in plants in relation to plant-microbe interactions. Here, we briefly summarize the current understanding of plant molecular pathways involved in plant interactions with beneficial and pathogenic microorganisms. Then, we highlight the progress in applying plant synthetic biology to elucidate the molecular basis of plant responses to microbes, enhance plant disease resistance, engineer synthetic symbiosis, and conduct in situ microbiome engineering. Lastly, we discuss the challenges, opportunities, and future directions for advancing plant-microbe interactions research using the capabilities of plant synthetic biology.
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This content will become publicly available on June 11, 2026
Plant Individuality: A Physiological Approach
While plants provide some of the most interesting cases for individuality-related problems in philosophy of biology (e.g., Clarke 2012; Gerber 2018), no work has examined plant individuality through specifically focusing on physiological processes, a lacuna this paper aims to fill. We think that different domains of biology suggest different approaches, and our specific focus on physiological processes, such as plant hormone systems and source-sink balance regulations, will help to identify coordinated systems at different scales. Identifying physiological individuals is crucial for a wide range of research in plant biology, including research on plant nutrition, transport and accumulation of nutrients in edible parts, and plant responses to various stress conditions such as plant diseases and changing abiotic conditions. Although plants do produce systemic responses to local stimuli (e.g., a sudden wound on one leaf can result in a whole-plant response), considering them as individuals is (often) problematic. They are highly modular organisms, and they can grow vegetatively, constituting clones of what seem, superficially, to be individual organisms. Moreover, as with animals, there are problems raised by their symbiotic relations to micro-organisms, most notably the mycorrhiza, through which they may be connected to other plants. We argue that coordinated plant systems can be distinguished at multiple scales from a physiological perspective. While none of these is a unit that must be necessarily called “the individual,” they offer integrated approaches for various research problems in plant science.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2240749
- PAR ID:
- 10632680
- Publisher / Repository:
- Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology
- Edition / Version:
- https://doi.org/10.3998/ptpbio.5261
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2475-3025
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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