‘Plant probiotics’ project hits the headlines
The Disease Suppressive Microbes project has been featured in i newspaper. The article ‘Plant ‘probiotics’ could keep soil healthy and pests at bay without pesticides’ focuses on the potential to develop cocktails of ‘good bacteria’ which could be applied to synthetic foam-based soils to reduce the need for pesticides.
Project leader Professor Duncan Cameron told i “Scientists have learned a lot in recent years about how beneficial bacteria in our guts keep us healthy – and we believe the same is true for plants. By investigating how tomato plants interact with good bacteria in the soil through their roots, we hope to be able to develop plant probiotics to boost their immune systems and help them fight diseases without the need for harmful pesticides.”
These techniques could be particularly useful for glasshouses and polytunnels where the use of synthetic growth medium is already common, and where bacterial diseases can spread rapidly, causing devastation.