ABSTRACT
A plant disease results from the intimate interaction between a plant and a pathogen. Disease suppressiveness of soil is specific to a given class of disease. Soil microbiome biodiversity is increasingly accessible on the basis of the novel advanced omics methods. The general strategy to identify microbial populations involved in disease suppressiveness consists of comparing the structures and diversity of microbiomes across soils showing different levels of suppressiveness in order to identify those microbial groups and populations that are preferentially associated with suppressive soils. Natural disease suppressiveness is a complex phenomenon, resulting from the activity of various populations of microorganisms. High-throughput sequencing can provide much more detail with respect to the taxa that are associated with suppressive soils. Systematic meta-omics approaches have provided explanatory notes to the mechanisms at play in disease suppression. The soil infectivity potential represents the risk of occurrence of a given soilborne disease in the test soil when cultivated with a susceptible cultivar.
