Comparison of culturable Gram-negative bacterial community structures in the rhizosphere of three fruit plants

Isolation and Characterization of a Plant Growth-Promoting Bacterium Acinetobacter sp. SuKIC24 From in vitro-Grown Basilicum polystachyon (L.) Moench

In the present study, a plant growth-promoting bacterium isolated from contaminated in vitro-grown Basilicum polystachyon (L.) Moench, an herbaceous plant, was studied and identified as Acinetobacter strain SuKIC24 based on the 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. The results revealed that the identified strain exhibited a strong ability to solubilize the phosphate with phosphate solubilization index of 4.0 and produced 387 µg/ml of soluble phosphate in Pikovskaya media after 7 days of incubation, whereas zinc solubilization efficacy was determined to be 175%. Reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) analysis revealed that the bacterium strain produced 77.36 µg/ml of indole-3-acetic acid. Plant inoculated with the bacterium strain was found to demonstrate a significant increase in height of B. polystachyon as compared to the control plant. The present findings indicated that the identified bacterium strain might act as plant growth-promoting bacterium (PGPB).

Impact of abiotic stressors on native rhizospheric bacterial community of Cajanus cajan

Salinity and drought are the major abiotic stresses that limit agricultural productivity. Application of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) is an attractive technology but with the bottlenecks of reduced efficacy and survivability in the environment. For increased efficiency of PGPR strains, the impact of stresses on the native bacterial community needs to be studied. Experimentally induced stresses would be ideal to assess the immediate perturbances in the structure of soil bacterial community. Hence, the study focused on the effect of experimentally-induced salinity, and drought stress on rhizospheric bacterial community of Cajanus cajan. A plant growth experiment was set up to induce salinity and drought stresses. Shifts in the bacterial community were assessed by a culture-independent technique of denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis using 16S ribosomal RNA gene and transcript as markers, leading to a comparison of the resident with the active bacterial community. The impact on plant was evaluated by measurement of plant biometrics. Further, salinity and drought-stressed conditions led to distinct shifts in native and active rhizospheric bacterial community, corresponding to the higher decline at induction of stresses, and stabilization at later time points. The study encompasses the perturbations in the active and resident rhizospheric bacterial community caused by the induction of two different abiotic stresses along the plant's growth.