Plant-Microbe Interaction and Recent Trends in Biotechnology for Secondary Metabolite Production in Medicinal Plants

It is important to unravel plant–microbe interactions in order to comprehend their benefits and losses, which can aid in developing new strategies for improving plant fitness and production of commercially important secondary metabolites. In this chapter, we discuss the beneficial and negative plant–microbe interactions in medicinal plants. The microbiome of medicinal plants may directly impact the metabolome of the host and modify the phytochemical production. Many reports showed that medicinal plants have a plethora of unique and structurally divergent bioactive metabolites, which have high specificity due to microbial association that further influences the production and efficacy of medicinal compounds. We summarize different aspects of plant–pathogen interactions to bridge the knowledge gaps that need to be filled to use plant–microbial ecology to their full potential. Further, we review the advancements in biotechnology to study the genomics of plant resistance and interrogate the molecular aspects behind biological events associated with plant–microbe interactions.