ArticleMicrobiome2026
Ecology-guided Bacillus SynCom from a rice-duckweed core reveals division of labor for concurrent growth promotion and sheath blight suppression.
Article in Microbiome, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Challenges and Future Directives of Synthetic Biology in Engineering Plant-Microbe Partnerships for Sustainable Agriculture.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Review
- Article
- Progress in understanding the infection mechanisms, soil microecological imbalance, and integrated control strategies of tobacco black shank.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Synthetic microbial communities for plant growth promotion and soil-borne disease suppression: design principles, mechanisms, and translational challenges.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundEcologically derived synthetic communities can provide robust plant benefits, yet generalizable rules for assembling multifunctional consortia remain limited. We hypothesized that a "top-down" community assembled from an ecological core would yield complementary functions and resilience superior to reductionist mixes.
resultsWe distilled an eight-member, Bacillus-dominated synthetic community (hereafter referred to as SynCom) from a rice-duckweed agroecosystem by targeting taxa consistently shared across soil, root and shoot niches. Under greenhouse conditions, the SynCom concurrently promoted rice growth and suppressed sheath blight caused by Rhizoctonia solani, reducing the final disease index by 70% without detectable phytotoxicity. Leave-one-member perturbations (-Dx), combined with untargeted LC-MS profiling and qRT-PCR of biosynthetic genes, revealed a division-of-labor architecture: individual strains specialized in auxin production, siderophore-linked iron mobilization, or lipopeptide/polyketide-based antagonism. These complementary yet partially redundant contributions mapped members, metabolite pools, plant outcomes and rendered community performance resilient to single-member loss. Across -Dx contrasts, the complete SynCom uniquely recovered the full suite of plant-growth metabolites (e.g., indole-3-acetic acid, acetoin/2,3-butanediol) together with antimicrobial chemistries (e.g., surfactin, bacillomycin, fengycin, difficidin). We formalize an assembly heuristic, ecological core, complementary functions, redundancy check, that links ecological origin to predictable, multi-trait performance.
conclusionsA top-down, ecology-guided route can generate a multifunction SynCom with demonstrated greenhouse efficacy and mechanistic transparency. By coupling-member perturbations with multi-omics readouts, our study provides a transferable rule for building resilient plant-associated consortia and a tractable framework for future genetic and in-plant chemical confirmations. Video Abstract.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.