Harro Bouwmeester on chemical communication between plants and soil microbes

We are pleased to announce that our next external guest in the NCCR Seminar Series will be Prof. Harro Bouwmeester, from the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. Prof. Bouwmeester heads the Plant Hormone Biology group, which studies how plants use signaling molecules to interact with other soil organisms, such as parasitic plants, insects, nematodes and the microbiome.

Harro Bouwmeester’s group notably investigates an important class of plant hormones known as strigolactones; these molecules, which are released by the plant roots, stimulate and attract mycorrhizal fungi to form a beneficial symbiosis with the plant. To research strigolactones and other rhizosphere signaling molecules, the group uses a wide range of molecular techniques, including metabolomics, transcriptomics, and metabolic engineering.

The root microbiome is increasingly considered as important to plants as the gut microbiome is to animals and humans. In 2020, supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Prof. Bouwmeester and five partners from other Dutch universities launched Microbial Imprinting for Crop Resilience (MiCRop), a 10-year collaborative research programme that will investigate how plants recruit beneficial micro-organisms. This highly ambitious research consortium will analyse the root microbiome dynamics of 100 wild and cultivated plant species using advanced omics approaches, data integration and modelling.

In 2019, Harro Bouwmeester was appointed member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Arts (KNAW).

He will give an NCCR talk entitled: ‘Belowground chemical communication of plants with other organisms and MiCRop(s)’. The seminar will take place on 6 April 2021, from 12h00 to 13h00 CEST. You can access this public seminar through this Zoom link. Find more information on the NCCR Seminar series here.