Larger Picture of Bioinoculants: Shaping up the Microbiome towards Plant Growth Promotion
Shilpi Sharma,
Assistant Professor,
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
With immense pressure on agriculture to feed the growing population, together with the need to curb chemical inputs for enhancement of productivity, there is a pressing need to adopt eco-friendly sustainable means worldwide. Bioinoculants have been in application since decades but their non-target effects on plant rhizospheric community still lies in infancy. The difficulties in tracking bioinoculant strains, understanding their mechanisms of action, and the limited number of studies addressing their risk, if any, have led to a decline in confidence of such amendments, amongst farmers. A polyphasic approach was employed to comprehensively study the impact of bioinoculants using cultivation-dependent as well as state-of-art molecular microbiology tools to deduce their contribution to shaping the rhizospheric microbiome for an overall enhancement of plant growth and productivity.
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