Finger millet and sorghum interaction to microbiome of their wild relatives for sustainable food production in Ethiopia

Finger millet and sorghum are most grown crops in Ethiopian semiarid environments due to the potential to grow under high temperature, low moisture, and poor soils.

Although these crops perform better than other cereals, their productivity and yield is very low because of the challenging environment.

Formerly we have shown that wild progenitors of cereals native microbiome  represents a strategy for addressing crop plant nutritional requirements.

We hypothesize that the breeding lines inoculation  with the bacterial collection from their wild relatives, isolated based on hormone catabolism activity, results in  significant re-programming of finger millet and sorghum metabolism via the stimulation of mineral element uptake and utilization that lead to a boost in the metabolic activity.

The inoculation effect  will be tested using advanced phenotyping technologies such as PacBio SMRT, high resolution microscopy, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and MALDI-TOF MS.

We aim identification of root candidate traits  to be further used by  Ethiopian plant breeders for  identification of loci associated with nutrient utilization.

The work builds upon  S.Timmusk’s financed RD projects in SSA  (SRC and SIDA Biotech 2018) and the project “HeRo - Healthy Roots: Development of tools for the selection of robust cultivars in Swedish plant breeding, with focus on the root system” coordinated by M. Weih and financed by the Swedish Centre for Breeding of Food Crops (SLU Grogrund).