b"ENGINEERED SOLUTIONSWhile biologicals are generally formulated products of selected microorganisms or compounds that are applied to the soil, foliage or seed with the intention of changing the existing microbiome, another stream of related research focuses on harnessing and lever-aging naturally occurring microbial communities. Some researchers have approached that concept as an engi-neering problemessentially gluing a specific microbe to a root biochemically. Beginning in the 1990s, French researcher Yves Dessaux and his colleagues designed plants that secreted specific sugars, then engineered a bacterium that depended on those sugars but couldnt produce them on its own. This created a symbiotic relationship where the bacterium had to colonize the plant roots to survive, showcasing a sophisticated example of how plants and microbes can be engineered to cooperate.In the three decades since then, significant work has been done on microbial engineering to customize microbial communities to create designer seed microbiomes. By identifying specific microbes that perform critical functions like nutrient solubilization or path-ogen suppression, researchers are finding ways to engineer seeds to recruit these beneficial microorganisms in a targeted manner. This approach could lead to crops that are naturally more resilient to environmental stresses, including drought and salinity. Theres a lot Jan Leach, the associate dean for research at Colorado State Universitysmore to understand before this pathway to leveraging the microbi-College of Agricultural Sciences. ome can be more fully utilized, says Leach.We're beginning to understand things about what the plant produces that attracts a good, healthy microbiome and what we might be able to manipulate in the plants so that, for example, their roots will attract beneficial microbes and repel non-beneficial ones, she says. Changing a plant is pretty complex because it takes many genes to make the chemicals they secrete, which governs that micro-biome recruitment. I expect, though, that probably within the next 10 years we'll have huge progress in this area, maybe five years even. 22ISEED WORLD EUROPEISEEDWORLD.COM/EUROPE | FEBRUARY 2025"