ICTS faculty member Akshit Goyal, together with Amey Redkar (NCBS) and Veena Anil (UAS-GKVK), has received a grant from DBT on climate-resilient agriculture.
This DBT BioE3 collaborative project brings together researchers from three Bangalore institutes -ICTS, NCBS, and UAS-GKVK - to tackle a pressing agricultural challenge: how can we protect crops from diseases using microbial communities rather than pesticides?
The project is engineering a “dream team” of beneficial microbes - a minimalistic consortium - drawn from tomato roots and compost tea. Using a combination of high- throughput screening, theory & computational modeling, and field trials on tomato and groundnut, Dr. Goyal and collaborators aim to develop a community that helps crops withstand both fungal attacks and water stress. Ultimately, they hope to promote the use of ecological principles for sustainable, climate-resilient agriculture.
ICTS congratulates Dr. Goyal for this achievement and looks forward to the success of this promising collaboration.