To help improve crop breeding strategies and overcome challenges such as making plants more tolerant of marginal lands, and stresses such as drought and low nutrient availability, researchers are focusing on understanding and promoting beneficial plant-microbe relationships. In Nature Genetics, a team led by JGI and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers assembled a catalog of plant and microbial genomes to identify and characterize candidate genes that aid bacteria in adapting to plant environments. “Here we used a massive genomic and computational effort to address the fundamental and important question: ‘How does the plant microbiome interact with the plant?’” said study co-first author and JGI research scientist Asaf Levy, a research scientist at the JGI. Read more on the JGI website.