Abstract
Light, water and healthy soil are three essential natural resources required for agricultural productivity. Industrialization of agriculture has resulted in intensification of cropping practices using enormous amounts of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that damage these natural resources. Therefore, there is a need to embrace agriculture practices that do not depend on greater use of fertilizers and water to meet the growing demand of global food requirements. Plants and soil harbor millions of microorganisms, which collectively form a microbial community known as the microbiome. An effective microbiome can offer benefits to its host, including plant growth promotion, nutrient use efficiency, and control of pests and phytopathogens. Therefore, there is an immediate need to bring functional potential of plant-associated microbiome and its innovation into crop production. In addition to that, new scientific methodologies that can track the nutrient flux through the plant, its resident microbiome and surrounding soil, will offer new opportunities for the design of more efficient microbial consortia design. It is now increasingly acknowledged that the diversity of a microbial inoculum is as important as its plant growth promoting ability. Not surprisingly, outcomes from such plant and soil microbiome studies have resulted in a paradigm shift away from single, specific soil microbes to a more holistic microbiome approach for enhancing crop productivity and the restoration of soil health. Herein, we have reviewed this paradigm shift and discussed various aspects of benign microbiome-based approaches for sustainable agriculture.
Highlights
The health of soil plays an essential role in the ability of plants to produce food, fuel, and fiber for a growing world population
Because natural resources are limited and their overuse pollutes the environment, the continued use of fertilizers and water to meet the demand of future global food requirements is not sustainable
We propose that the manipulation of the plant microbiome holds tremendous potential for agricultural improvement (Table 1)
Summary
The health of soil plays an essential role in the ability of plants to produce food, fuel, and fiber for a growing world population. The composition of the cultivable community associated to rhizosphere and root surrounding soil fractions shared a high similarity Most of these isolates were able to promote plant growth and alleviate drought-induced stress with enhanced abilities observed in Bacillus and the Rhizobacteria strains. It is increasingly evident that plants employ fine-tuned mechanisms to shape the structure and function of their microbiome, with different genotypes of the same plant species growing in the same soil yet associating with distinct microbial communities (Berendsen et al, 2012) This is demonstrated in the findings of Bazghaleh et al (2015), who clearly demonstrated the importance of intraspecific host variation in the association of chickpea cultivars with AM and non-AM fungi. While one study reported (Svenningsen et al, 2018) that soil with a higher abundance of Acidobacteria suppresses the normal functioning of extra-radical mycelium in arbuscular mycorrhizae, another study found that Glomus intraradices and Glomus mosseae suppressed most of the associated soil microbial community (Welc et al, 2010)
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