INTERACT | Collaborative Crop Resilience Program

Decoding the Rhizobiota Interactome for Improved Crop Resilience (INTERACT)

INTERACT will focus on the essential and mutually beneficial interactions between plants and microbes below ground. This project will go beyond a mere inventory of wheat plant microbiome community members, and will provide much needed insight into rhizosphere ecology and microbial communication, with a goal of establishing diagnostic chemical/biological signatures for agro-system stability. With this knowledge, we can rationally and strategically manipulate plant-associated microbial communities to support high plant productivity across challenging climatic and stress scenarios. These critical advances in our understanding of rhizosphere community structure and the chemical landscape that influences its formation and function will be achieved by using genomics, transcriptomics, metaproteomics, metabolomics, in-field and greenhouse plant phenotyping, and network analysis/model construction for evaluating rhizosphere interactions for wheat.

Meet our team:

Project Lead

Associate Professor Mette Haubjerg Nicolaisen
University of Copenhagen
Molecular Microbial Ecology

Project Manager

Kristine Kirkensgaard

University of Copenhagen

Professor Lars Stoumann Jensen, Plant Nutrition and Growth

Associate Professor Efstathios (Stathis) Diamantopoulos

Associate Professor Dorette Müller-Stöver

Assistant Professor Rosanna Catherine Hennessy

Postdoctoral Researcher Frederik Bak

Postdoctoral Researcher Klara Cecilia Gunnarsen

Graduate Student Ying Guan

Graduate Student Cortney Horn Herms

Graduate Student Jakob Klinge Meier

Graduate Student Xingyun Yi

Research Assistant Kitzia Yashvelt Molina Zamudio

Laboratory coordinator Dorthe Thybo Ganzhorn

Aarhus University

Professor Carsten Suhr Jacobsen, Molecular Microbial Ecology
Senior Researcher Peter Stougaard, Molecular Microbiology/Metagenomics
Senior Researcher Anne Winding, Microbial Ecology

Postdoctoral Researcher Athanasios (Thanassis) Zervas

Graduate Student Christine Lorenzen Elberg

Graduate Student Julie Egelund Andersen

Researcher Lea Ellegaard-Jensen

Researcher Rumakanta Sapkota

Laboratory Technician Tanja Bergovic

Laboratory Technician Tina Thane

North Carolina State University

Professor Amy Grunden, Microbial Physiology
Professor Ignazio Carbone, Microbial Phylogenomics
Professor Marc Cubeta, Fungal Ecology and Plant disease Ecology
Assistant Professor Oliver Baars, Metabolomics
Assistant Professor Manuel Kleiner, Proteomics

Graduate Student Clara Tang

Graduate Student Emma Morris

Graduate Student Jabeen Ahmad

Graduate Student Juliet Ochola

Programmer Jim White

Technical University of Denmark

Professor Jens Christian Frisvad, Fungal Ecology
Professor Ákos T. Kovács, Microbial Physiology
Professor Bjarne Kjær Ersbøll, Big Data/Statistics

IT Specialist & Coordinator Pietro Antonio Bortolozzo

Metabolomics Core Manager Aaron J. C. Andersen

Senior Researcher Thomas Martini Jørgensen

Graduate Student Caja Dinesen

Graduate Student Adele Pioppi