ABSTRACT
Animals and plants have co-evolved with a multitude of microorganisms that cooperatively perform beneficial functions. Consequently, they are both considered as supraorganisms comprising their genomes and the genomes of microbes that inhabit them. Expeditious progress made in DNA sequencing technologies, computational biology, machine learning, and big data analytics has broadened our knowledge on the critical roles host-associated microbial communities perform in defining human health, driving soil function, and agricultural crop yield. The current trend reveals a paradigm shift in microbial biotechnology research focus from investigating individual genomes to studying microbial communities and their interactions in varied ecosystems. An in-depth understanding of the functional interactions of the microbiome with their human host will be pivotal for designing predictive model diagnosis and inventing microbiota-based interventions for the treatment of diseases linked with microbiota imbalance. More so, leveraging the knowledge of plant-associated microbial assemblages holds tremendous potentials to mitigate the challenges of crop yield, land degradation, and food security. In this chapter, we discuss microbiome compositions of plants and humans, their functional collaborations, and research frontiers in human and plant host-microbiome interactions. The chapter also highlights potential innovative applications of these interactions in healthcare and agriculture.
