Understanding the role of microbiome interactions in the cold stress tolerance of plants

project: FreezingBioprotector

Abstract
Cold stress is one of the main limiting factors in crop production. Wild plants belonging to the Rosaceae family growing in cold environments, such as alpine regions, are adapted to low temperatures. Plants are associated with complex microbial communities including endophytic bacteria that are able to colonize the internal plant tissues and can contribute to cold tolerance of their plant hosts.
In this talk, Dr. Malek Marian will give an overview of the objectives and research activities of FreezingBioprotector, a project aimed at understanding the role of microbiome interactions in cold stress tolerance of plants. In particular, he will show some results regarding the isolation and identification of psychrotolerant endophytic bacteria associated with wild cold-adapted rosaceous plants growing in alpine regions.

Bio
Malek Marian is a postdoc fellow at the Centre Agriculture Food Environment-C3A (University of Trento/Fondazione Edmund Mach). His current work focuses on the taxonomic and functional characterization of plant-associated microbial communities in cold environments including their role in alleviation of cold stress on plants. His research combines molecular biology, plant physiology, amplicon sequencing and bioinformatics approaches as well as techniques in microbiology and cryobiology. Malek joined C3A as a Marie Curie fellow after a postdoc at the Microbial Ecology group at Ibaraki University (Japan). He holds a PhD in Agricultural Science and MSc.’s in Applied Biological Science from Gifu University (Japan).