Chapter 9 - Rhizospheric Microbial Diversity: An Important Component for Abiotic Stress Management in Crop Plants Toward Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture sector is often hit badly by various abiotic environmental stresses resulting in huge economic losses. It is an important technical challenge for agriculture science community to facilitate adaptation of crop plants to abiotic stresses such as high temperatures, draught, salinity, pathogens, nutrient limitation, and other climatic disasters. The abiotic stresses encountered by crop plants are routinely managed by widespread use of fertilizers and pesticides which enhance the growth and survival of plants under stress conditions as they provide protection against nutrient limitation as well as attack by potential microbial pathogens. The pretreatment of seeds with fertilizers and pesticides has also been shown to enhance stress tolerance in various laboratory studies. As alternative strategy for the future, several research studies have been carried out to develop stress-resistant transgenic crop varieties. However, use of transgenic crops has not been widely accepted due to various ethical and scientific reasons. This situation has led to an unprecedented opportunity for progress in plant stress management for crops by understanding, engineering, and exploiting the plant-microbe interaction within rhizospheric regions. Recent development with culture-independent studies on microbial communities has clearly indicated that composition, diversity, and dynamics of the rhizospheric soil microflora play a vital role in plant growth promotion under stressed environment. The rhizospheric microbial community contributes to the plant stress response not only via improving the availability of nutrition and resources, but also by mitigating the abiotic stresses encountered by the concerned plant. Thus, rhizospheric microbial diversity can be the most critical component for abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants and could be exploited as an exemplary means for abiotic stress management necessary for sustainable agriculture. This chapter provides an insight into the literature available pertaining to role of rhizospheric diversity in abiotic stress management in crop plants, comparison of cultivable and non-cultivable rhizospheric microbial diversity, merits and demerits of available stress management strategies and future prospective for use of rhizospheric microbial diversity as abiotic stress management system.