“…Plants interact intimately with diverse microorganisms including bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists, and viruses that inhabit both external and internal plant tissues (Berendsen et al, 2012;Fitzpatrick et al, 2020). These plant-microbe interactions comprise a range of symbiotic relationships including parasitism, commensalism, competition and mutualism, playing a pivotal role in shaping plant health and development (Pattnaik et al, 2021;Vandenkoornhuyse et al, 2015). While certain microbial groups such as mycorrhizal fungi, phytopathogens and nitrogenfixing bacteria have been extensively studied over the last century, it was only in recent decades that the advent of high-throughput sequencing techniques revealed the remarkable and complex taxonomic and functional diversity of the plant-associated microbiota.…”