Interlinking Soil Microbial Diversity and Rhizodeposition for Enhancing Nutrient Uptake and Productivity

Abstract

To provide sufficient food and nutrition to an estimated world population of 9.6 billion by 2050, the present level of global food production has to be increased by 50-70%. This monumental task will be abysmally difficult to achieve, owing to the reduction in arable land, increase in frequency and intensity of climate extremes, shrinkage in available agricultural inputs, reduction in soil fertility and organic carbon, predicted inundation of coastal ecosystems due to ingression of seawater, reduction in the diversity of plants due to rapid afforestation, the incidence of newer pests and diseases, etc. Plant species allow specific groups of microorganisms to proliferate in the rhizosphere, depending upon the qualitative and quantitative nature of photo-assimilated carbon flow in the subterranean system in the form of rhizo deposition, the primary source of food and nutrition to the growing organisms. Thus, the quality and quantity of rhizodepositionin a crop ecosystem will determine the diversity of crop-associated rhizosphere microbes vis-à-vis the fate of biogeochemical cycles operating in the rhizosphere, and the availability of essential nutrients for the growing crops to realize genetic yield potential. Therefore, enhancing and or altering the structural and functional diversity of beneficial microbes in the rhizosphere by changing the nature of photo-assimilated carbon in rhizodeposition, quantitatively and qualitatively, through genetic augmentation of crop plants, would facilitate the identification of superior plant varieties for a given ecosystem for ensuring improved plant growth and yield by enhanced nutrient availability.