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.

Agrobacterium-mediated transformation is the dominant method for plant transgenesis, yet it frequently produces multi-copy, structurally complex T-DNA insertions associated with transgene silencing, u...