2025, Vol. 8, Special Issue 2

author(s)
Vankayala Mohit Venkata Phani Kumar, Akhilesh Chandrapati, Amit Mandlik, Yenda Damodhara Rao, Paritosh Tripathi and Shivam Maurya

abstract
The plant mycobiome, which associates with plants, plays a crucial role in enhancing ecological management and environmental conditions. Its effectiveness in maintaining ecological fitness is evident in several ways, including improving plant growth, exhibiting parasitism against harmful microorganisms, providing cross-protection, producing microbial compounds, competing with disease-causing microbes for nutrients, space, and colonization, and inducing systemic resistance against abiotic and biotic stresses. The plant-associated mycobiome, particularly plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), significantly contributes to plant growth and development by facilitating nutrient acquisition, promoting plant growth, producing siderophores, aiding in rhizoremediation, generating phytohormones, and enhancing abiotic and biotic stress tolerance. Recent advancements in genetic sequencing techniques have enabled the study of complex plant-AMF interaction networks in natural environments. Various molecular techniques, such as metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, and metaproteomics, provide a holistic understanding of microbial community structure, function, and dynamics. Additionally, imaging technologies, including dyeing methods, epifluorescence microscopy, vital and non-vital destructive staining techniques, and phosphatase assays, facilitate the visualization of AMF networks. However, research on plant-associated mycobiomes faces several challenges, such as sample complexity, limited cultivation, DNA extraction and sequencing bias, database and annotation limitations, as well as difficulties in understanding interactions, dynamics, and functional profiling.