Abstract
Interactions among the plant microbiome and its host are dynamic, both spatially and temporally, leading to beneficial or pathogenic relationships in the rhizosphere, phyllosphere, and endosphere. These interactions range from cellular to molecular and genomic levels, exemplified by many complementing and coevolutionary relationships. The host plants acquire many metabolic and developmental traits such as alteration in their exudation pattern, acquisition of systemic tolerance, and coordination of signaling metabolites to interact with the microbial partners including bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists, and viruses. The microbiome responds by gaining or losing its traits to various molecular signals from the host plants and the environment. Such adaptive traits in the host and microbial partners make way for their coexistence, living together on, around, or inside the plants. The beneficial plant microbiome interactions have been exploited using traditional culturable approaches by isolating microbes with target functions, clearly contributing toward the host plants’ growth, fitness, and stress resilience. The new knowledge gained on the unculturable members of the plant microbiome using metagenome research has clearly indicated the predominance of particular phyla/genera with presumptive functions. Practically, the culturable approach gives beneficial microbes in hand for direct use, whereas the unculturable approach gives the perfect theoretical information about the taxonomy and metabolic potential of well-colonized major microbial groups associated with the plants. To capitalize on such beneficial, endemic, and functionally diverse microbiome, the strategic approach of concomitant use of culture-dependent and culture-independent techniques would help in designing novel “biologicals” for various crops. The designed biologicals (or bioinoculants) should ensure the community’s persistence due to their genomic and functional abilities. Here, we discuss the current paradigm on plant-microbiome-induced adaptive functions for the host and the strategies for synthesizing novel bioinoculants based on functions or phylum predominance of microbial communities using culturable and unculturable approaches. The effective crop-specific inclusive microbial community bioinoculants may lead to reduction in the cost of cultivation and improvement in soil and plant health for sustainable agriculture.
Highlights
Cultivated soils are one of the most diverse microbial ecosystems, harboring bacteria, fungi, archaea, viruses, protists, and many others and supporting various biogeochemical cycles and plant growth
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts that soil erosion could result in between 20 and 80% losses in agricultural yields due to human activities and climate change events. This erosion of topsoil could result in variable agricultural yields, depending on the soil type and the resource use pattern (Kopittke et al, 2019; Christy, 2021)
The agrarian management of soils depends on many synthetic chemical inputs for increasing profitability and productivity
Summary
Cultivated soils are one of the most diverse microbial ecosystems, harboring bacteria, fungi, archaea, viruses, protists, and many others and supporting various biogeochemical cycles and plant growth. Connecting the microbiome composition comprising PGP as well as plant-growth-compromising activities and diversity to their function is a great challenge for future research These fundamental, microbial-mediated adaptive functions can help address the significant challenges in sustainable food production under the changing climatic conditions. The strategic application of microbial communities rather than as individual isolates to improve plant production offers enormous potential, under adverse environmental conditions Their applications can serve multiple purposes, such as reducing climate change impact and avoiding excessive reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. With increasing data availability on plant microbiome from different ecological niches, strategic approaches based on the concomitant use of culture-dependent and culture-independent techniques, targeting all the plant-beneficial microbial groups, are necessitated to develop novel biological products in all categories like biofertilizers, biopesticides, bioagents, or bioinoculants and biostimulants.
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