The 2026 call has attracted considerable interest from the research community with 21,627 applications submitted.

Plants and other photosynthetic organisms interact with their environment and surrounding microbiota through specialized associations. A global core microbiota has been proposed at high taxonomic levels, such as the order level. However, it remains unclear which environmental factors and how microbe-microbe interactions drive variation of this core microbiota at lower taxonomic resolution. Here, we leveraged the environmental diversity of 141 sites across the southwest of France to characterize algal populations, and their associated bacterial and fungal microbiota. We then performed a meta-analysis, combining these data with published datasets to formally identify the global core microbiota of terrestrial photosynthetic organisms, which comprises seven bacterial and five fungal orders. We next investigated diversity within this core microbiota and the environmental drivers shaping site-specific community composition. While environmental factors have a low impact on the total relative abundance of core orders, the core microbiota at the ASV-level is impacted by climatic factors, edaphic factors, and plant community descriptors. Using interaction network analysis, we finally explored how microbe-microbe interactions contribute to the assembly of stable core communities. Our results show that core ASVs occupy central positions in algal-associated microbial networks and that distinct core orders drive site-specific variation in core microbiota structure. Together, these findings highlight the importance of both environmental context and microbial interactions in shaping the composition and stability of the core microbiota associated with photosynthetic organisms. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, 951444 – PATHOCOM, erc-stg-948219, EPYC Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR-10-LABX-41 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, https://ror.org/00cwqg982, BB/ X011054/1, BBS/E/F/000PR13631

To cause rice blast disease, the filamentous fungus Magnaporthe oryzae develops a specialised infection cell called an appressorium, which generates enormous turgor to breach the rice leaf cuticle. Al...

Interview with Susana Coelho, who uses brown algae to study evolution, development, and life-cycle complexity at the Max Planck Institute for Biology.

Rhizobacteria play a central role in supporting plant growth, contributing to nutrient acquisition, stress tolerance and disease suppression. Harnessing and improving rhizosphere microbial communities therefore represents a promising avenue towards more sustainable agriculture. Recent advances in microbiome ecology and synthetic biology have enabled the rational design of microbial consortia.

Rhizobacteria play a central role in supporting plant growth, contributing to nutrient acquisition, stress tolerance and disease suppression. Harnessing and improving rhizosphere microbial communities...

This study reports a bivalent factor, ULTRAPETALA1, that can counteract as well as promote PRC2 activity at hundreds of developmental genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. The pro-PRC2 activity of ULTRAPETAL...

Nature Plants - This study reports a bivalent factor, ULTRAPETALA1, that can counteract as well as promote PRC2 activity at hundreds of developmental genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. The pro-PRC2...

Plants and animals respond to pathogen attack by mounting innate immune responses that require intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins. These immune receptors detect pathog...

Increasing evidence suggests that lichens are not just a partnership between one fungus and one alga or cyanobacterium but may contain multiple intera…

Increasing evidence suggests that lichens are not just a partnership between one fungus and one alga or cyanobacterium but may contain multiple intera…

In many algae, photosynthesis is boosted by biophysical CO2-concentrating mechanisms, which pack the CO2-fixing enzyme Rubisco into liquid-like organelles called pyrenoids. Engineering C3 crops with a...

Trees use CLAVATA3/EMBRYO SURROUNDING REGION-related (CLE) peptides to promote ectomycorrhizal symbiosis, revealing an additional regulatory layer in tree–

Legumes are pivotal for sustainable agriculture, yet their productivity is hindered by soilborne pathogens such as Aphanomyces euteiches . This study introduces Aeschynomene evenia as a novel model to...

Symbioses have been fundamental to colonization of terrestrial ecosystems by plants and their evolution. Emergence of the ancient arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis was followed by the diversification o...

Land plants include angiosperms, gymnosperms, bryophytes, lycophytes, and ferns, each of which may deploy distinct strategies to resist pathogens. Here, we investigate fern-pathogen interactions by characterizing novel pathosystems and analyzing the diversity of fern immune receptors. A collection of fern species was inoculated with a diverse set of filamentous microbes, and disease symptoms were assessed. We further leveraged published genome mining tools to analyse the diversity of receptor-like kinases, receptor-like proteins (RLKs/RLPs) and nucleotide-binding and leucine-rich repeats (NLRs), along with key immune signalling components, in ferns. Our results reveal that ferns exhibit a range of responses to pathogens, including putative non-host resistance and more specific resistance mechanisms. Among ten ferns tested, Pteris vittata displays the broadest spectrum of pathogen compatibility. Genome mining indicates that ferns encode a diverse repertoire of putative immune receptors, antimicrobial peptides, and mediators of systemic acquired resistance. Ferns possess numerous RLKs/RLPs, resembling those required for cell-surface immunity in angiosperms. They also encode diverse NLRs, including sub-families lost in flowering plants. These findings provide insights into disease resistance evolution and open promising perspectives for crop protection strategies.

The success of plants on land has been enabled by mutualistic intracellular associations with microbes for 450 million years ([Delaux and Schornack 2021][1]). Because of their intracellular nature, th...

A super-pangenome analysis incorporating 123 newly sequenced bryophyte genomes reveals that bryophytes exhibit a larger number of unique and lineage-specific gene families than vascular plants.