Plants recruit specific soil microbes through a sophisticated ‘cry for help’ strategy to mitigate environmental stresses. Recent advances highlight the potential of leveraging this mechanism to develop microbe-based approaches for enhancing crop health, but challenges remain in refining the criteria and conceptual frameworks to effectively investigate and harness these plant–microbe interactions.

Microbes drive the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Here, Li et al. present a framework for integrating genome-inferred microbial kinetic traits into ecosystem mechanistic models, and use it to benchmar...

Strigolactones (SLs) regulate angiosperm development and promote symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizae. Here the authors show that bryosymbiol, an SL present in bryophytes and angiosperms, promotes AM...