Ayodeji Bello

Bello is investigating how management practices alter soil core microbiota and their association with crop health and soil borne diseases. A key element of disease management is determining the optimized control measures that are economically feasible and environment-friendly.

The proposed research combines modern high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and the IoT (internet of thing) enabled soil sensing networks to explore the roles of the core microbiota to standard management practices that correlate to soilborne disease occurrence and severity in soybean, corn, wheat, and tobacco in order to identify the optimized control measures and to develop advanced agricultural forecasting platforms to further prevent plant disease outbreaks.