Harnessing microbiomes to redefine medicinal plant agriculture.

Abstract

Medicinal plants link agriculture, ecosystem health, and human therapeutics, with bioactive compound profiles providing a direct and economically meaningful readout of microbiome function. Although microbial inoculation can enhance pharmacologically relevant metabolites under controlled conditions, these effects are context dependent and rarely reproducible in the field. This efficacy gap reflects three ecological constraints: introduced microbes are excluded by resident communities, environmental variation overrides laboratory-optimised functions, and inoculants fail to persist without mutualistic feedback. Addressing these barriers requires shifting from disposable inputs to microbiome stewardship: rewilding beneficial communities, designing climate-adapted consortia, and managing soil as living infrastructure. Whether such stewardship produces measurably different bioactive profiles and therapeutic outcomes under field conditions remains the empirical question on which its One Health rationale ultimately depends.