Harnessing the plant microbiome in 21st-century China: Recent progress and future perspectives

The plant microbiome, an essential component of the plant holobiont, plays key roles in promoting plant growth, enhancing stress tolerance, improving nutrient use efficiency, and mitigating the effects of climate change. Harnessing the plant microbiome would support the transition toward sustainable agriculture by reducing our reliance on chemical inputs and strengthening ecosystem function. Over the past decades, Chinese researchers have made significant progress in plant microbiome research and have gained increasing international recognition. In this review, we summarize major advances in exploring the microbiome in China, including conceptual frameworks, methodological developments, and agricultural applications. Chinese researchers have proposed models such as amplification-selection, functional compensation, and precision agricultural microbiomes, providing new insights into how plants shape their rhizosphere microbial communities. Moreover, the integration of high-throughput culturomics, single-cell sequencing, and artificial intelligence has shifted the focus from descriptive studies to functional analysis of microbial communities. Field studies have demonstrated that altering the plant microbiome can improve the efficiency of fertilization, remediate saline-alkali soils, enhance the development of stress-resilient crops, and mitigate heavy metal contamination. The transition of these technologies from controlled settings to highly variable field environments remains a major bottleneck due to inconsistent microbial persistence and reproducibility. Nonetheless, these advances highlight China's emergence as a leading contributor in plant microbiome research and offer valuable strategies for addressing global challenges, including enhancing food security, supporting environmental sustainability, and mitigating the effects of climate change.