Rhizosphere Intelligence: Harnessing Root-Microbe Dynamics for Resilient Cropping System

For more than half a billion years, plants and microbes have shared their resources in a common ground known as the rhizosphere. The rhizosphere, a biologically active zone of the soil influenced by plant roots, has complex and dynamic interactions between soil microbes that shape crop plant health, resilience, and productivity. Despite decades of research, the processes of the rhizosphere remain underutilized in cropping systems management. This chapter entails the advances in rhizobiology with a focus on root-microbe dynamics, interactions, and their implications for sustainable crop management. It offers a thorough understanding of how intelligently the rhizosphere exhibits its connection between plants and microbes. The chapter further describes how rhizosphere intelligence can be viewed as an information-processing network with multiple levels of organization in which plants and microbes exchange chemical and molecular information throughout their separate life cycles. Root exudates take the highest level as a selective filter in recruiting or excluding microbes, and microbes provide services such as nitrogen fixation, phosphorus solubilization, pathogen suppression, and abiotic stress suppression. The future of rhizosphere intelligence is expected to result in a paradigm shift for sustainable agriculture, in which a combination of biology, engineering, and digital tools is anticipated to create a resilient cropping system.