Dr. Manish Raizada explains how we could manipulate bacteria to control crop growth

Raizada, whose plant microbiome research is funded in part by the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance, and other scientists in North America, Asia and elsewhere are trying to exploit the relationship between plants, bacteria and other microbes. 

So-called "biologicals" have the potential to fix nitrogen, improve disease resistance or retrieve nutrients from the soil.

“We have biologicals that do great outdoors in certain wheat or corn varieties. And they do terribly … in other varieties,” Raizada said, explaining that dozens of genes are involved in the plant-microbe relationship.

Read the story in the The Western Producer: Plants and bacteria: friends for 500 million years