Declining soil fertility and farm productivity is a major global concern in order to achieve food security for a burgeoning world population. It is reported that improving soil health alone can increase productivity by 10-15% and in combination with efficient plant traits, farm productivity can be increased up to 50-60%. In this article we explore the emerging microbial and bioengineering technologies, which can be employed to achieve the transformational increase in farm productivity and can simultaneously enhance environmental outcomes i.e., low green house gas (GHG) emissions. We argue that metagenomics, meta-transcriptomics and metabolomics have potential to provide fundamental knowledge on plant-microbes interactions necessary for new innovations to increase farm productivity. Further, these approaches provide tools to identify and select novel microbial/gene resources which can be harnessed in transgenic and designer plant technologies for enhanced resource use efficiencies.
Keywords: designer plants; farm productivity; metagenomics; microbes; transgenic plants.