Albeit little-known, plant microbiota or holobionts are essential for plant health and sustainable agriculture. Philippe Vandenkoornhuyse : The plant microbiota is a component of plants whose very existence was long unsuspected. However, it was not until 2012 that research on the plant microbiota really took off, with the publication of two studies , one German and the other American, which described the microbiota of the ideal model plant in plant biology, Arabidopsis thaliana . Talking of which, some of your research shows that conventional agriculture is harmful to the plant microbiota. P. V.: It simply consists in changing farming practices in order to take better account of the plant microbiota.