Stijn Nagelkerke, council member

About my research

Plants can recruit microbes that assemble on the root system into a functional microbiome that improves root architecture, fosters enhanced nutrient uptake from the soil, and stimulates plant adaptive mechanisms to cope with various biotic and abiotic stresses. Potato, the world’s third food crop and a key Dutch export product, depends strongly on its microbial partners, yet we still lack systematic insight into which microbes matter most for growth and performance. Building on our earlier work showing that potato growth can be predicted from seed tuber microbiomes, we now investigate the influence of soil-derived microbiomes. Using 102 Dutch agricultural soils, we transfer microbial communities into sterilized substrates and monitor potato growth in the Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Centre (NPEC). NPEC enables daily, non-invasive imaging of growth dynamics, 3D canopy architecture and photosynthetic performance under controlled conditions. We will perform 16S and ITS amplicon sequencing to characterize the root microbiome. The microbiome data will be integrated with the phenotyping data to train machine-learning models that predict potato growth from microbiome composition and that will identify the microbial taxa most strongly associated with potato growth across soils.