Aim Microbiome rewilding seeks to harness plant‐microbe interactions for sustainable agriculture, assuming that ancestral microbial partners have been lost during domestication and geographical spread. Designing microbiome rewilding strategies requires a quantitative and predictive understanding of the fundamental ecological processes—selection, dispersal, and drift—driving microbial assembly and persistence in the rhizosphere...

The rhizosphere influence on the soil microbiome and function of crop wild progenitors (CWPs) remains virtually unknown, despite its relevance to develop microbiome‐oriented tools in sustainable agriculture. Here, we quantified the rhizosphere influence—a comparison between rhizosphere and bulk soil samples—on bacterial, fungal, protists and invertebrate communities and on soil multifunctionality across nine CWPs at their site...

Host–microbe interactions are increasingly recognized as important drivers of organismal health, growth, longevity and community‐scale ecological processes. However, less is known about how genetic variation affects hosts' associated microbiomes and downstream phenotypes. We demonstrate that sunflower ( Helianthus annuus ) harbours substantial, heritable variation in microbial communities under field conditions. We show that m...