What does the practical definition of the plant microbiome have?

Consider it as the protruded physiology of the plant: bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protists that are on roots (rhizosphere), on the inside (endophytes), or on the outside (phyllosphere) of the leaf. This interaction modulates nutrient uptake, stress tolerance, growth signaling, and pest suppression.

This is connected to the EU Mission, A Soil Deal for Europe.

The Mission advocates for place-based Living Labs and Lighthouses that will achieve soil-health outcomes by 2030. The work of plant-soil microbiomes is at the core: restoring biological functioning, reducing external inputs, and demonstrating effects in practice (not just in vitro). Multi-actor co-creation, standardized monitoring, and site-soil replication are normally expected during calls.

What are the most suitable types of project: RIA, IA, or CSA?

The majority of the projects of biological mechanisms and tool-building become RIAs (100% funding of approved direct costs). IAs are typically demonstrated and deployed with farmers (70 percent with for-profits and 100 percent with non-profits). The territory of CSA is capacity building or networking (100%). Evaluators in microbiome proposals seek a clear path from the hypothesis to the prototype bioinoculant or practice, to the field effect, and to quantified benefits.

What is a competitive plant-microbiome proposal?

There are three ingredients which recur: (i) causal evidence across scales (omics – isolate/consortium tests – mesocosm/field), (ii) transparent statistics with pre-specified success thresholds (e.g. ≥ 15% yield stability under water stress or ≥ 30% drop in pest incidence versus local practice), and (iii) plausible engineering that makes experiments recoverable across soils, seasons and operators.

What are the common indicators of impact in the sector?

The best approach will be a balanced scorecard, which will include agronomic (yield stability, reduction of inputs per hectare) and soil-health (aggregate stability, microbial diversity/functional gene abundance, respiration), resilience (time-to-recovery after heat or drought), and pest/disease control (incidence, severity index). Include practical considerations, such as cost per hectare, applicability, shelf life, etc., so the findings apply to the ideas.

In what respect is it applicable to microfluidics?

Microfluidics compresses the discovery loop. You can: (i) screen hundreds of plant-associated strains and consortia under gradients of conditional conditions (pH, root exudates, antimicrobials), (ii) image root-microbe chemotaxis and biofilm formation at the single-cell scale, (iii) prototype delivery formats (droplets, hydrogels, encapsulation) that resist desiccation and UV, and (iv) executable automated assays that recapitate rhizosphere dynamics. This saves weeks of strain selection and de-risks field pilots.

What is actually being offered by MIC in such projects?

Our products include the design and development of tailored microfluidic chips, the integration of pumps, valves, and sensors, and the automation of assays that reveal plant outcomes in relation to microbial functions. The prototyping and validation core and backbone that we tend to lead (or co-lead) in Living Labs includes translating user demands into tools, repeatedly creating b-prototypes, field-trial instrumentation of clean data, and SOPs packaging. As an SME, we also contribute to work-plan architecture, TRL gating, and risk assessment.

Pitfalls that evaluators tend to indicate about microbiome proposals?

Some of the microbiome proposals overlap: generalizing from one soil, mixing nutrient effects with actual microbial activity, inconsistent metadata, and poor storage/delivery plans for inoculants. The replication must span at least two edaphic settings: an abiotic control site, and weather, management, and predefined conservation and delivery conditions (e.g., viability ≥80% after 3 months at ambient) must be included.

Regulation, ethics, and data governance: how do we cope with them?

Compliance with GMO/GMM where applicable, transparent biocontrol registration roadmaps, and bio-safety in the management of plant pathogens. Adhere to FAIR principles, prepare a Data Management Plan in advance, and coordinate protocols by site.

What TRLs are realistic?

Discovery and lab validation TRL 3-4. Mesocosm and first on-farm pilots normally target TRLs of 5-6 by mid-term of the project, and multi-site validation and near-market formulations by the end of the project, at TRLs of 6-7. Microfluidic tooling can also increase the number of hypotheses that you test in the same time period and produce strong and similar datasets.

What would a 36-month workable plan look like?

Months 0-6: isolate/consortium selection, assay automation, baseline soil measures. 6-12: formulation and delivery tests, first mesocosms. 12-24: expanded field validation, shelf-life and logistics tests, regulatory dossier preparation, and exploitation planning (licensing, manufacturing, training kits). The 0-12 window is normally compressed by MIC using parallel rapid-prototyping lines.

What do we need to prepare before contacting MIC?

A little blurb with (i) crop and farming background, (ii) threats to targets (e.g., root pathogens, drought), (iii) measurable outcomes that you are interested in, (iv) candidate locations, soil limitations, and management, and (v) topic identification and likely results in the case that a particular call is made. Using this, we can suggest an architecture, partners, budget logic, and an instrumentation plan that maintains a tight learning loop.

Bio-based experiments used to de-risk plant-microbiome interactions?

Microreactors. Root-on-a-chip chemotaxis assays on controlled exudate gradients; droplet microreactors: high-throughput co-culture compatibility; micro-encapsulation: temperature, UV, desiccation stress tests; micro-porous soil analogues: motility, colonization. These, paired with image and signal analysis aided by ML, provide early, discriminative readouts that correlate with field results.