Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of

Inefinableplants.com.

What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? We have a really fascinating topic for you today, but before I get to that, I just want to say supporting the show is the only way it can keep going. And there's a lot of great ways to do that, but one of the best is by picking up some of our customizable merch over at T-Spring.

There are links in many places over at indefensibleplants.com.

You can look at the top and click Apparel or you can check the show notes on every podcast

episode over at indefensiblelantzance.com slash podcast. Once again, our merch is customizable and there's

a style for everyone out there and it really helps keep the show up and running.

But today, we are talking about plant-microb interactions.

And when I say plant microbes, people's heads usually go in one or two categories, either the pathogen world or the mutualistic world.

But my guest is Dr. Annie Chung, and she is here to talk to us about how those interactions are truly a spectrum, and they're often context dependent. And when you think

about context, you have to think about how rapidly our world is changing. I don't want to take

any of her thunder away. She describes it so eloquently, and as so many academics prove, there

are so many more questions to answer.

So there's a lot of inspiration in here for burgeoning scientists.

So let's just jump right into it.

Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Annie Chung.

I hope you here. I'm really excited to talk to you today about your research. But let's start off with an introduction. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do. My name's Annie Chung. I am currently an assistant professor at the

University of Georgia in both the plant biology and plant pathology departments. Nice. And we work on

plant ecology and microbial ecology. Very exciting. And that's an interesting intersection. We're going to unpack a lot of that today. But what brought you to this line of research? I mean, were you a plant kid growing up? Were you more of a microbe kid growing up? Which is kind of a funny thing to say unless you had a good microscope. But where did this all kind of start for you?

I think it would be fair to say that I was a plant kid growing up. I mean, my mother always really liked gardening. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in New Zealand. And so when I was there, I lived in Christchurch, which is called

the Garden City. People are very obsessed with their flowers and gardens there. And so I think

that did rub off a little bit. Like, I've always been interested in plants. And I've always been

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