Advances in Plant Microbiome Research for Climate-Resilient Agriculture: Toward Sustainable Farming

This new book, Advances in Plant Microbiome Research for Climate-Resilient Agriculture: Toward Sustainable Farming, covers important aspects of plant microbiome research through contributions from scientists with the latest information available in this area of research.

The book provides an introduction to the concept of plant microbiome and its importance for climate-resistant crop plants and discusses the tools and techniques to analyze plant microbiome for sustainable agriculture productivity. It covers microbial endophytes as warriors for plant defense against abiotic and biotic stress. The book also highlights the importance of phyto-microbiomes and presents an overview of the role of metabolomics in bioremediation for sustainable crop production, introducing various metabolomics tools such as GC-MS, LC-MS, and NMR for the sustainable remediation of toxic pollutants from the environment. Web sources and software for metabolomics data interpretation are included as well.

The book discusses abiotic and biotic stresses and their effects on crops, the concept and strategies of the rhizosphere microbiome manipulation in crop improvement, the microbial traits in plant stress tolerance and their importance for agriculture, exogenous applications of several compounds and phyto-microbiomes that mitigate the negative effects of salt stress on maize, and the beneficial plant microbial association for sustainable agriculture.

With its coverage of the recent research on the current methods and technological advancements for increasing plant resilience to adverse climate scenarios, this volume will be a rich resource for botanists, plant specialists, and researchers concerned with crop science, plant physiology, and plant protection.

Ashwani Kumar, PhD, is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Allahabad (A Central University), Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India. Before joining this position, he worked at Dr. Hari Singh Gour University (A Central University), Sagar, India, for more than nine years. His research focused on plant-microbe interactions, metagenomics, lignocellulosic biofuels, and bioremediation. Honored with several awards and fellowships throughout his career, he has published over 80 articles (Google Scholar Citations: 6469; i-10:71, h-index: 36; Scopus citations: 4067), 30 book chapters, and edited one book. He is serving as an editorial board member for several prestigious journals. He has been featured in the top 2% of the World Scientists List thrice (2020, 2021, 2022). He is a life member of several professional organizations in India, and he was elected as a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, the International Society of Environmental Botanists, and the National Institute of Ecology. He earned his PhD in Bioenergy from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Durban University of Technology and Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.