Project description
Enabling healthy biofilms for sustainable agriculture
To ensure a healthy environment, economic profitability and socioeconomic equity, it is crucial to promote and implement more sustainable agricultural methods. This entails the exploration of innovative approaches. Funded by the European Research Council, the BacBio project aims to investigate the potential of beneficial microbes (biofilms) as a partial replacement for pesticides, while mitigating the risk of contamination by human pathogens. BacBio will employ diverse strategies to study the feasibility of using beneficial microbes for plant protection. It will focus on two closely related organisms with contrasting functions: Bacillus subtilis, which safeguards plants; and Bacillus cereus, which is pathogenic to humans. By analysing the chemical differences in their extracellular matrices, BacBio aims to advance our understanding of bacteria-plant interactions.
Objective
Sustainable agriculture is an ambitious concept conceived to improve productivity but minimizing side effects. Why the efficiency of a biocontrol agent is so variable? How can different therapies be efficiently exploited in a combined way to combat microbial diseases? These are questions that need investigation to convey with criteria of sustainability. What I present is an integral proposal aim to study the microbial ecology and specifically bacterial biofilms as a central axis of two differential but likely interconnected scenarios in plant health: i) the beneficial interaction of the biocontrol agent (BCA) Bacillus subtilis, and ii) the non-conventional interaction of the food-borne pathogen Bacillus cereus.
I will start working with B. subtilis, and reasons are: 1) Different isolates are promising BCAs and are commercialized for such purpose, 2) There exist vast information of the genetics circuitries that govern important aspects of B. subtilis physiology as antibiotic production, cell differentiation, and biofilm formation. In parallel I propose to study the way B. cereus, a food-borne pathogenic bacterium interacts with vegetables. I am planning to set up a multidisciplinary approach that will combine genetics, biochemistry, proteomics, cell biology and molecular biology to visualize how these bacterial population interacts, communicates with plants and other microorganisms, or how all these factors trigger or inhibit the developmental program ending in biofilm formation. I am also interested on knowing if structural components of the bacterial extracellular matrix (exopolysaccharides or amyloid proteins) are important for bacterial fitness. If this were the case, I will also investigate which external factors affect their expression and assembly in functional biofilms. The insights get on these studies are committed to impulse our knowledge on microbial ecology and their biotechnological applicability to sustainable agriculture and food safety.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
29016 Malaga
Spain