PhD success at IGZ: Mohamed Ramadan Abdelfadil defends dissertation on salt-tolerant microbiomes

The starting point for his studies was a comparison between the microbiome in the root zone of crops without salt stress and that of halophytes – plants that grow in very high salt concentrations. Using previously published metagenome data sets, he was able to show in silico that the roots of these halophytes are colonised by unique bacterial genera that otherwise only occur in seawater or very salty environments.

Based on these findings, Mohamed Ramadan Abdelfadil treated tomato plants with a consortium of these special bacterial strains. The result: under high salt stress, the treated tomatoes showed less growth depression than untreated plants. In addition, he developed a method for transferring the entire root microbiome of halophytes such as Salicornia europaea (glasswort) to tomatoes using special clay balls. Here, too, the bacterial strains specific to halophytes, such as Marinobacter sp., Erythrobacter sp. and Thalassospira sp., successfully established themselves on the tomato roots and reduced salt stress for the plants.

This work demonstrated for the first time that crops can tolerate salt stress better with the help of targeted transfer of microbiomes. The in silico method for searching for specialised microbial community structures also opens up the possibility of identifying microbial groupings adapted to other stress situations in the future and applying them to reduce stress in crops.

Mohamed Ramadan Abdelfadil received the Yousef Jameel Scholarship for his studies and was supervised jointly by Prof Dr Steffen Kolb (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research) and Dr habil. Silke Ruppel (IGZ). He also conducted research in close cooperation with the Faculty of Agriculture at Cairo University (Egypt) and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun (Poland).

We congratulate Dr Mohamed Ramadan Abdelfadil on completing his doctorate and wish him every success in his future career.

Further information
Abdelfadil, M. R.; Patz, S.; Kolb, S.; Ruppel, S. (2024) Unveiling the influence of salinity on bacterial microbiome assembly of halophytes and crops. Environmental Microbiome. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40793-024-00592-3

Abdelfadil, M. R.; Taha M. H.; El-Hadidi M.;[…]; Ruppel, S. (2022) Clay chips and beads capture in situ barley root microbiota and facilitate in vitro long-term preservation of microbial strains, FEMS Microbiology Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1093/femsec/fiac064