The meeting begins at 1pm with Grower Tips, where OOS members address a specific orchid growing challenge, e.g. a specific pest, repotting, mounting, humidity, or fertilization, and answer questions from the audience. Come with questions, and they’ll provide answers! The Business Meeting will follow at 1:20–1:50pm; Program Presentation at 2–3pm; and Show Table, Auction, and Raffle at 3–3:30pm. Follow CDC guidelines with respect to COVID-19 precautions.

Program Presentation

“Orchid Mycorrhizal Relationships” by Dr. Kelly D. Craven

Speaker’s Biography

Dr. Kelly Craven likes microbes. So much so, he has studied them for the past thirty years. We each have roughly six pounds of microbes that call the human body home. This collective group of microbes is called the “human microbiome” and while the large part of these inhabit our stomach and digestive tract, they are present in all tissues and organs. Critically, our microbiome is not just freeloading but performs essential functions for our survival and health. The aforementioned gut microbes are needed to extract nutrition from the food we eat. We also inherit a “seed” microbiome from our mothers during birth, which then grows and helps to train our immune system and other vital functions. So important are our microbiomes, there is even a gut-brain axis where our gut microbes engage in bi-directional signaling with our brains, where they impact our cognitive functioning and behavior. In short, we as “macro-organisms” require the development and proper functioning of our microbiomes to survive and thrive.

Dr. Craven’s research centers around the idea that microbiomes are as important for plants as they are for humans. Natural soils contain the most diverse group of microbes known to man, where some feed on organic matter and inorganic nutrients while others are attracted to the root systems of plants, where they feed on simple carbohydrates that exude from the roots. The plant uses photosynthesis to fix CO2 into these simple carbohydrates and exchanges them to microbes in the soil and rhizosphere (where the soil meets the roots) for organic and inorganic nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. The plant-microbe symbiosis is very similar to the gut microbes in humans. One can imagine a root as a gut turned inside-out, both fed by the host in exchange for nutrient extraction. Microbiomes also help their hosts deal with environmental stresses, such as heat, drought and soil infertility, all of which we have plenty of here in Oklahoma. Craven seeks to improve stress resilience in important crop plants here in Oklahoma by taking advantage of natural plant microbiomes and designing new ones to grow more healthy and abundant crops with less synthetic fertilizers and less water. To reach this auspicious goal, he will combine state-of-the-art DNA sequencing and metagenomics methods with greenhouse and field trials here at OSU to understand what plant and soil microbiomes look like in healthy versus depleted soils. If Craven can delineate microbiomes that are consistently present in healthy, functioning soils he may be able to identify which ones might be missing from depleted ones. 

This leads to an exciting practical outcome of Craven’s program where he isolates microbes from plants growing outside in living soils. In his lab, he screens each one to identify those that have useful traits that might improve productivity and stress resilience in Oklahoma crops. These microbes are then inoculated singly or in simple microbiomes into target plants and grown in the greenhouse to see if the predicted benefits to the plant develop. The best plant-microbe combinations from these trials then move to field trials. Field trials are essential because, unlike in greenhouses, environmental conditions change in the field and the introduced microbiome(s) will encounter “resident” soil microbiomes that are adapted to that soil and local environmental conditions. As such, it is common for the indigenous soil microbes to outcompete the introduced ones. Improving the persistence of introduced microbiomes will also play a major role in Craven’s research.

Microbiome research is emerging as a critical component of human health and will play a significant part of our health assessments in the future. Medical intervention strategies will be designed to rectify dysfunctional microbiomes on or in our bodies, such has already been used successfully to treat digestive tract diseases like irritable bowel syndrome. If Craven can understand the proper functioning of plant microbiomes associated with healthy Oklahoma plants and soils, he can use this knowledge to improve productivity and disease prevalence while reducing water and fertilizer use. Incorporation of his research with crop breeding efforts and environmental modeling (among others) is a powerful approach that can help alleviate the devastating impacts of world-wide food shortages and climate change that await us in the very near future.

Dr. Craven is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Oklahoma State University.