Seminar: Jon Bennett

Plant-soil interactions in Medicago sativa

As a perennial legume, Medicago sativa interacts with a broad diversity of both beneficial and antagonistic soil microbes. Understanding these interactions is critical to sustainable usage of this plant as a forage crop, yet strong intraspecific variation in plant-microbe interactions make this challenging. Using a range of experiments, we show that cultivars vary in their response to soil microbiomes and that these differences vary with environmental conditions, but that some of these interactions may be predictable based on the traits of the specific cultivar.