Multimodal Chemical Signatures of Plant Holobiont Resilience in Mediterranean Post-Fire Ecosystems

Topic description

Wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent and severe under climate change, profoundly altering Mediterranean ecosystems. While post-fire plant resilience has traditionally been studied at the level of individual organisms, growing evidence suggests that plants and their associated microbial communities form an integrated functional entity—the plant holobiont—whose collective metabolism may play a key role in adaptation to environmental disturbances. However, the chemical and microbial mechanisms underpinning this resilience remain largely unexplored.

The MULTICHEM-HOLO project aims to determine whether post-fire resilience is an emergent property of the plant holobiont, arising from dynamic interactions among plants, microorganisms, and specialized metabolites. The project will develop an original multidisciplinary framework that combines chemical ecology, microbiome analysis, metabolomics, and artificial intelligence to decipher the ...