Warwick researcher Prof. Gary Bending has won a €2.5 million ERC Advanced Grant to investigate how plants coordinate the daily rhythms of soil microbes around their roots, work that could transform soil management and crop health.
The soil immediately surrounding plant roots, the rhizosphere, is home to complex microbial communities that play a crucial role in plant health by making nutrients available for plants to grow. Recent research has shown that these microbes follow a daily rhythm. Since plants also have internal body clocks that control when they take up nutrients, plants might be synchronizing their microbial partners so that nutrient-cycling happens exactly when the plant needs it.
The newly funded RHYTHMS project will test this idea and, for the first time, reveal the mechanisms behind these microbial rhythms. Understanding this process could open new ways to manage soil for healthier, more productive plants, and help design agricultural systems that are both sustainable and resilient to global challenges.
Professor Gary Bending, School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick said: "We know that microbes around plant roots follow daily cycles, but we do not yet understand what controls them or why they matter. RHYTHMS will allow us to test whether plants are effectively setting the clock for their microbial partners. If we can understand how plants and soil microbes coordinate their activity, it could fundamentally change the way we think about managing soils."
This project is among the most competitively funded in European science. Of 3,329 proposals submitted to the ERC Advanced Grant programme, only 319 were selected (a 9.6% success rate). The €2.5 million award will enable a five-year investigation into how soil microbes synchronize with plant daily rhythms.
President of the European Research Council, Prof. Maria Leptin, said: 'The new Advanced Grant projects demonstrate the creativity, ambition, and intellectual boldness that frontier research requires. The ERC's role is to support researchers who are asking difficult scientific questions and want to venture into unexplored territory in pursuit of new knowledge. Congratulations to all our new grantees."
