Plant Mycobiome: Current Research and Applications

Abstract

Plant mycobiome studies are one of the leading burning aspects of the twenty-first century for ecological management and sustainable agricultural. A plant-associated fungal community plays an important role in maintaining ecological fitness by cycling organic matter and channeling nutrients across the trophic levels. Several reports highlighted the need for plant mycobiome studies for better disease management, ecological practices, and the use of eco-friendly methods for crop production. In this context, plant mycobiome revealed the effect of the fungal community on the composition of other microbial communities associated with the plant, plant growth, and plant responses against the pathogens. Fungal biodiversity, functionality, and associative interaction with other microbiome organisms and plants are revealed by high-throughput sequencing methods that broaden our view on understanding the fungal importance to plants. The present chapter discussed the modern tools and techniques utilized to study fungal diversity and community structure by the use of different kinds of OMICS approaches such as ITS rDNA gene or specific functional gene sequencing, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Here, the chapter focused on the current research, development of new techniques and approaches that can provide an integrative insight of the role of fungal communities in the plant microbiome. Plant mycobiome and their diversity are important to predict plant growth and survival against the pathogen and multitrophic interactions between the organisms to identify their functional cores in regard to plant health and forecast which fungal community is likely to affect plant fitness and produce useful secondary metabolites.