Finkel Lab

Terrestrial microbial ecology and plant-microbe interactions

Plants grow within a complex microbial community, collectively termed the plant microbiome. Harnessing the plant microbiome for optimizing crop growth depends on a concerted effort to curate microbial diversity in nature, and to understand how this diversity is maintained.
The overarching goal of our research program is to promote a systems-level understanding of the rules that govern the assembly and maintenance of a functionally robust plant microbiome and its effects on plant health.
We aim to understand how the ecological context, in particular microbe-microbe interactions, determines microbiome assembly and the resulting plant phenotypes.