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Impact of Plant-Associated Microbial Communities on Host Plants Under Abiotic Stresses

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Microbial Interventions in Agriculture and Environment

Abstract

Plants face various biotic and abiotic environmental stresses in their lifetime. These environmental impacts reduce plant growth and productivity. Out of abiotic stressors, drought, salt, heat, and heavy metal ion contamination are the major challenges faced by plants. For overcoming these challenges, plants adopt certain physiological and biochemical changes. These changes include a variation in an aspect ratio of root-shoot length, leaf wilting, leaf abscission, generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), altered relative water content, and accumulation of free radicals that can disrupt cellular homeostasis, thereby affecting cell viability. Plants also produce stress hormones, namely, abscisic acid and stress ethylene which induce closure of leaf stomata leading to reduced water loss from the plants and withstand various molecular and metabolic changes. Plants undergo physiological and metabolic changes, activating signal transduction mechanism to re-establish cellular homeostasis to generate tolerance against various abiotic stressors. The expression of stress-responsive genes is regulated not only by protein regulators but also by various regulatory RNAs.

The deleterious impacts of abiotic stressors in plants can be overcome by adopting different agriculture practices along with genetic engineering approaches. However, these approaches are highly technical, time-consuming, and labor intensive and, therefore, are challenging to practice. One potential alternative to improve plant growth under abiotic stressors can be the application of plant-associated microbial communities which not only provide stress tolerance to the plants by producing a wide range of metabolites and enzymes that help plants to withstand various biotic and abiotic stresses but also improve crop productivity. Microbes mediate induction of physical and chemical changes in plants at a physical, biochemical, or molecular level in the presence of abiotic stressors to alleviate their deleterious effect, a process termed as induced systemic tolerance (IST). In this chapter, we present an elaborated account of the impact of plant-associated microbial communities on the host plants challenged to the abiotic stresses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Pilani, Rajasthan, India

    Saumya Arora & Prabhat Nath Jha

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  1. Saumya Arora
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  2. Prabhat Nath Jha
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Correspondence to Prabhat Nath Jha .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ICAR-National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Microorganisms, Maunath Bhanjan, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Dhananjaya Pratap Singh

  2. Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Vijai Kumar Gupta

  3. ICAR-National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Microorganisms, Maunath Bhanjan, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Ratna Prabha

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Arora, S., Jha, P.N. (2019). Impact of Plant-Associated Microbial Communities on Host Plants Under Abiotic Stresses. In: Singh, D., Gupta, V., Prabha, R. (eds) Microbial Interventions in Agriculture and Environment. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8383-0_10

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