Under-utilized Potential of Microbiomes (soil) in Sustainable Urban Agriculture: Developing the Micron-scale Benefits to Reduce Chemical Footprints by 40% and Enhance Nutritional Value by 20%.

1. Utilizing the advantages of pant-microbiome interactions at micron-scale dimensions, this project seeks to improve the nutritional value of selected edible crop species of Southeast Asia.
2. The mutual dependence between plants and microbes has co-evolved for millions of years and improved human health. Carefully chosen phytochemicals can serve dual purposes, protecting plants from disease while also providing human health benefits in the form of nutrients and nutraceuticals. These multiple benefits occur at the micron scale but they are currently being extracted through the use of microbiome services with minimal consideration of their plant niches, microbe-microbe, and microbe-plant environment interactions. Similarly, there hasn’t been a lot of research into how plant-based nutrition and nutraceuticals, particularly those found in the Asian diet, influence human health as mediated by the microbiome.

Thus, improving plant traits and human health outcomes can benefit from developing a framework to identify the host-microbiome-environment interactions for beneficial purposes.