Plants interact with their environment, including all the microbes around them such as bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses. Plant-microbe interactions are complex and can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful to the plant. One such harmful interactions is between crops and fungal pathogens. Wheat in temperate climate regions suffers from diseases such as Fusarium Head Blight and Septoria Leaf Blotch, causing major yield losses every year.

Though farmers still heavily rely on chemical pesticides, a more sustainable alternative to fight plant pathogenic fungi could be the use of beneficial biocontrol agents (BCAs). The BCAs we investigate in particular are the filamentous, spore-forming Streptomyces sp. Streptomyces produce a plethora of secondary metabolites such as antibiotics, antivirals, anticancer drugs, but also antifungal compounds, and are therefore of great interest.

The collaboration between two labs at PSB, namely Advanced Live Cell Imaging and the Rhizosphere (https://goormachtiglab.be/), and the company Aphea.Bio (https://aphea.bio/) aims to study the interaction between BCAs and fungal pathogens in planta. This will allow to gain insights into the mode-of-action which will in turn help the company to further optimize the BCA into a sustainable and environmentally-friendly product.