Publishable summary: 

Climate change largely affects agroecosystems. Increases in temperatures, the occurrence of extreme weather events and changes in precipitation patterns compromise agricultural productivity and food quality. Such extreme events are expected to be more frequent in the future. By metagenomics and metabolomics, the MiCroResi project aims at investigating the effects of extreme conditions such as salinity, aridity, heavy metals contamination and UV light on the microbial biodiversity in agricultural systems and in turn on crop yield. The main hypothesis is that the persistence of extreme conditions imposes a selection on the microbiota which could be exploited as a new source of plant-beneficial microbes. Since naturally adapted to extreme conditions, properly selected beneficial microbes will be further developed into new tools to be used in microbe-assisted cropping systems for the improvement of crop resilience to climate change.MiCroResi consortium is composed of five partners from Peru, Bolivia, Italy, Spain and Turkey, which are linked to four research infrastructures, i.e. MIRRI-IT, INDES-CES, IIFB-IIAREN and CEBAS. The infrastructures will be fundamental for the achievement of the project goals. MIRRI and IIFB-IIAREN will be both the source and sink of microbial biodiversity and INDES-CES will help with the generation and holding of genomic data which MiCroResi will work with. CEBAS will provide analyses of soil properties and crop/fruit quality (metabolomics). The multidisciplinarity of MiCroResi is ensured by the expertise of the project consortium, which includes microbiology, phytopathology, plant physiology, next-generation sequencing technologies, metabolomics and bioinformatics. All the project partners will work together for common objectives and their complementary expertise is the basis for an intense interaction. Special regard will be paid to the communication and dissemination of MiCroResi results to the scientific community and the society at large .