Certain bacteria, also called plant-growth-promoting-bacteria or PGPB, can improve or shield plant health from pathogens usually used to help crops.
To improve agricultural production further, it is helpful to determine which factors can improve PGPB behavior. Many PGPB are forming communities of cells, also called biofilms, which are helping to stick to plant roots.
According to EurekAlert, a group of researchers in North Carolina and Massachusetts showed interest in discovering other plant-related microbes that could help PGPB "better adhere to plant roots, with the hope that" augmenting the number of PGPB cells attached to roots would increase beneficial activities.
Using a liquid-growth-based approach, the scientists detected multiple strains of bacteria that increased the PGPB's adherence to plant roots over time.
Such results, EurekAlert also reported, specify that the chemical or physical interactions between different microbial species lead to "better long-term maintenance of PGPB on roots."
How Bacteria Can Use Each Other for Own Benefit
According to senior scientist Elizabeth Shank, who's involved with this study, their results underscore how bacteria can use each other to achieve their own benefit.
Such study findings could form groups of bacteria that can work together to better shield crop plants and enhance their growth.
The results of this study, added Shank, might be used "to understand better and design microbial treatments" that could enhance crop productions in agricultural environments.
To conduct this particular study, Shrank, together with her colleagues, performed a high-amount screen of microbes initially collected from the wild-grown plants' roots, guaranteeing that identified microbes might naturally come into contact with the plants' roots in native soil environments.
The researchers also looked into how other native bacteria might change the behavior of each strain of the PGPB, putting emphasis on the essentiality of understanding the manner of groups of microbes associated with plants that impact plants.
Agricultural Treatments
This study particularly concentrated on a PGPB that's presently used in agricultural treatments so that their results related to commercial involvements.
Shank explained, one essential effect of their research study may be further boosting "agricultural biotechnology firms" to consider the use of groups of multiple microbes instead of a single isolated bacterium in their quest for better and "longer-lasting biological treatments to enhance crop yield" and help in the improvement of food production.
The scientists' work presents how a "reasonably fast and straightforward screen" can determine essential microbial interaction and offers a beginning point for future research studying the mechanisms of these cell-to-cell links.
The PGPB
According to Hindawi journal, the microbes that can stimulate the growth of the plant, PGPB, that is, comprise those "that are free-living, those that form certain symbiotic associations with plants," microbial endophytes "that can colonize some or a portion of interior tissues of a plant, the then-called "blue-green algae," or now known as cyanobacteria.
Nevertheless, the differences between these microbes, they all use similar mechanisms. PGPB may simulate plant growth directly typically by either through the facilitation of resource acquisition or modulation of levels of plant hormones or indirectly by reducing the inhibitory impacts of several pathogenic agents on both the development and growth of the plant, that is, by functioning as "biocontrol bacteria."
ALSO READ : Romantic Mistletoe? Science Disagrees
Check out more news and information on Crops on Science Times.
