Shravan Sharma Parunandi Parunandi delivered a talk in the Sustainability Session and earned hashtag#3rd_place in the student competition. We are proud of your achievement!
Dr. Gayan Abeysinghe gave a talk and Dr. Tanya Wagner shared a poster in the Disease Council.

Congratulations to all members of the BNI Team, including Dr. Sanjay Antony Babu, Dr. Nithya Rajan, Dr. Muthukumar Bagavathiannan, Dr. William Rooney, Dr. Sakiko Okumoto, Dr. Shuyu Liu, on this well-deserved honor.

Since 2015, the team has built strong global partnerships and secured major competitive funding, including a multi-million-dollar effort to develop crops that thrive with lower nitrogen inputs.

The BNI Team brings together expertise across plant breeding, soil science, agronomy, and microbiology to advance a natural plant trait biological nitrification inhibition that helps retain nitrogen in soils, reduce fertilizer losses, and support more sustainable cropping systems.

We kicked off sampling at Stiles Farm, part of the Texas Water Observatory, uniting hydrology, biogeochemistry, and microbiology to develop a framework predicting how water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles interact across landscapes for sustainable land and water management.

Antony-Babu lab’s role focuses on microbial communities; how soil microbes respond to wet-dry cycles, redox shifts, and landscape heterogeneity, and how those microbial “ecotraits” help scale biogeochemical processes from individual pores to whole watersheds.

In this collaboration, led by Dr. Binayak P. Mohanty, our lab joins forces with the Mohanty lab and Dr. Salvatore Calabrese’s group.

#Looking_Ahead
This study spotlights Pseudomonas as a pivotal member of the #hyphosphere_pathobiome, suggesting a broader perspective on plant disease, highlighting microbial network interactions in determining outcomes and inform targeted interventions beyond “one-pathogen” strategies.

#Insights_Gained
Early recruitment and dominance of Pseudomonas comprising >95% of the community.
Hyphal association in action, revealing active spatial colonisation.
Metabarcoding and correlation analyses indicated competitive exclusion within the hyphosphere coinciding with Pseudomonas dominance.

#Our_Approach
We combined confocal time-lapse microscopy, 16S rRNA metabarcoding, culture-dependent isolation, whole-genome sequencing, and co-culture assays to characterize hyphosphere dynamics

#Why_It_Matters
FOV4 is among the most devastating soil-borne pathogens in cotton.
Traditional disease models focus on the pathogen. Our findings show that disease outcomes are shaped by hyphosphere-associated bacteria, shifting the paradigm from single-pathogen to community-driven pathogenesis.

#Key_Concept
We demonstrate that the hyphosphere of Fusarium wilt Race 4 (FOV4) is not a neutral microbial niche but a pathobiome hotspot, overwhelmingly dominated by Pseudomonas. Our work reframes plant disease as an outcome of microbial partnerships between pathogens and their bacterial associates

We congratulate them on their new roles, Ilksen as a Lead Research Scientist at #NewLife_Biosciences LLC, and Lucia as a Laboratory Assistant at Little Beakers Science Lab for Kids.

#Looking_Ahead
The implications extend far beyond this single pathosystem. Plant disease, as our findings underscore, is rarely the consequence of a solitary pathogen. It emerges from the complex interplay of microbial communities that shape both resilience and susceptibility.

#Insights_Gained
Microbial dysbiosis often precedes visible disease symptoms, highlighting early warning signs within the microbiome.

Most importantly, we found that pathobionts in the hyphosphere can be distinguished as a potentially distinct pathobiome within the broader dysbiosis community.