Rosalba Cipriani

I earned my Molecular Biology degree in Padova (Italy), and being born in the countryside helped me to have a closer look to the modern agricultural practices and to understand the urgent need of innovation and sustainability in land management, especially in the actual conditions of water and soil pollution and biodiversity loss. Therefore, in the last years I became really fond of exploring new techniques and approaches to tackle this problem. My PhD project is in collaboration with a company that deals with the collection and the transformation of waste and that produces compost, which has been traditionally used as a soil amendment for its organic matter and nutrient content and it seems to be one of the most promising solutions to the loss of soil biodiversity caused by anthropogenic activities. However, the investigation of the role of its microbiota in helping plant growth and health is still missing.

Thus, my aim is to characterize the community of microorganisms present in compost, and during my 1st year of PhD I demonstrated that the addition of compost to a soil poor of nutrients enriches the rhizosphere of tomato plants with beneficial PGPR, compared to plants treated with sterilized compost and a chemical fertilizer. Among these bacteria, I discovered that some of them were involved in stress response, so I set up a drought stress experiment with plants in different soil treatments, confirming that compost-treated plants had higher photosynthetic efficiency compared to the other conditions.

Adding data regarding metatranscriptomics would help my work by completing the picture of the functional role of bacteria in different compartments of the plant, also thanks to the experience in bioinformatics I gained until now. This will be really significant to pave the way for manipulating compost microbiota and plan concrete interventions in the field.

I presented my work at some congresses of Italian Botanical Society (SBI) and at MiCROPe in Vienna (2024).

December 2024