The soil microbiome – driver for plant health

Soils can be considered as major basis for life on earth. Soils provide a large number of ecosystem services including promotion of plant growth, safeguarding of drinking water resources, sequestration of carbon or protection of biodiversity. Most of these services are induced by soil biota, which provide the functional and catalytic backbone of soil quality. Thus in the last decades the soil microbiome has gained large attention by the public as well as by scientists, mainly with the aim to identify major drivers for the structure and function of the soil microbiome with the aim to overcome the threats of global change and to identify ways for sustainable land use. However, only the introduction of molecular methods has revolutionized our understanding on soil microbes recently. In the presentation highlights of these developments will be shown and consequences for future land use will be discussed.
Michael Schloter did his PhD at the University of Bayreuth, working on plant-microbe interactions in the rhizosphere of sugar cane and wheat. After his PhD Michael Schloter was PostDoc at EMBRAPA (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and at the EPA (Corvallis, US). In 2001 he became working group leader at the Institute of Soil Ecology in Munich (GSF - National Research Center). Since 2011 Michael Schloter is Director of the Research Unit for Environmental Genomics at the Helmholtz Zentrum in Munich and Professor for Microbiology at the Technische Universität München. The major interests of Michael Schloter are investigations on microbiomes in various environments including the plant soil interface and the human body.
Moderation: Professor Dr. Tim Urich