AccScience Publishing / MI / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/MI026380111
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PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE

Using artificial intelligence to study plant–microbiome interactions for sustainable agriculture

Gaurav Sablok1*
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1 St. Joseph-Krankenhaus, Alexianer, Berlin , Germany
Received: 17 September 2026 | Revised: 8 October 2026 | Accepted: 10 October 2026 | Published online: 19 October 2026
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Immunotherapy for Plant Diseases)
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Plant microbiome research is a rapidly developing and productive field, with substantial attention directed toward the identification of the major determinants of plant growth, nutrient acquisition, stress tolerance, disease resistance, and associated agricultural productivity. Advances in high-throughput sequencing and multi-omics technologies have generated large and complex datasets describing plant-associated microbial communities. However, the high dimensionality, sparsity, compositionality, and heterogeneity of microbiome datasets create substantial analytical challenges for conventional statistical approaches. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) provide new opportunities to identify microbial biomarkers, predict plant phenotypes, characterize plant–microbe interactions, and design beneficial microbial communities. Applications include plant disease prediction, crop productivity, abiotic-stress tolerance, nutrient cycling, biomarker discovery, microbiome-assisted breeding, and synthetic microbial community (SynCom) design. Recent studies increasingly combine AI with multi-omics, synthetic biology, and predictive modeling, indicating a transition from descriptive microbiome analysis toward microbiome engineering. Nevertheless, model generalizability remains constrained by small sample sizes, compositional data, technical variation, batch effects, environmental heterogeneity, and insufficient external validation. The combination of microbiome science and AI has considerable potential to support sustainable, climate-resilient crop production, but successful translation will require rigorous biological validation and field-scale testing.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
Plant microbiome
Rhizosphere
Machine learning
Artificial intelligence
Microbiome engineering
Multi-omics
Synthetic microbial communities
Crop improvement
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
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Microbes & Immunity, Electronic ISSN: 3029-2883 Print ISSN: 3041-0886, Published by AccScience Publishing