[SCAN] Lost in Translation: Decoding Stress-Induced Root Exudate Signals and Microbiome Recruitment

Title: Lost in Translation: Decoding Stress-Induced Root Exudate Signals and Microbiome Recruitment

Speaker: Juan Ignacio Vilchez

From: Plant-microbiome Interactions Lab, ITQB NOVA

Abstract: Plants under stress do not face their environment alone. Through root exudation, they dynamically reshape the chemical landscape of the rhizosphere, recruiting microbial partners that enhance adaptation and resilience. Yet despite growing evidence supporting this “call-for-help” strategy, our understanding of root exudates as ecological signals remains remarkably limited. Current models often overlook the temporal, spatial, and evolutionary complexity of exudation processes, while methodological inconsistencies and the overreliance on modern domesticated crops may obscure a much broader ancestral chemical vocabulary, a possible “lost-in-translation” event in plant-microbiome communication.

In this seminar, I will discuss how abiotic stress reprograms root exudate composition in tomato and how these changes shape microbial recruitment and function. Using an integrated framework combining metabolomics, culturomics, metabarcoding, functional assays, and synthetic community design, we identified stress-specific exudate signatures associated with the enrichment of microbial traits linked to osmoprotection, biofilm formation, phytohormone production, and stress resilience. Our results reveal highly dynamic exudation patterns that depend on stress type and developmental stage, suggesting that plants actively engineer distinct microbiome states during environmental challenge.

Beyond describing recruitment patterns, this work explores the translational potential of exudate-mediated microbiome assembly.

Understanding how plants naturally select microbial allies may enable the development of anticipatory microbiome engineering strategies, including prophylactic microbiota assembly before stress exposure, stress-inspired synthetic communities (SynComs), and next-generation biotechnological tools guided by ecological principles refined over millions of years of plant–microbe coevolution.

SCANs are weekly seminars that happen every Wednesday at noon by in-house researchers and invited speakers at ITQB NOVA.