Crop Microbiome Engineering and Relevance in Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Agriculture is the panacea of human’s very existence. Maintaining or increasing the agricultural productivity is needed to feed the ever-increasing global population, but we have limited resources like land and water, so effective management of available resources is need of the hour in ever-changing global environmental threats. Agriculture is exposed to vagaries of nature, and various abiotic stresses like drought, salinity, extremes of temperature and heavy metal toxicity are the major limiting factor for plant growth, threatening agricultural productivity and ecological sustainability. Microorganisms are the inhabitants of the most diverse environment and possess metabolic and physiological capabilities to tolerate various abiotic stresses. Such microorganisms naturally inhabiting plant rhizosphere can be exploited to ameliorate the effect of abiotic stresses in agriculture and enhancing growth and productivity. Having known the identity and characteristics of microbes involved in imparting tolerance to abiotic stress, provides us with the plethora of opportunities to modulate and restructure the microbial community composition at the roots of host plants through varied microbiome engineering techniques. Effect of abiotic stress on agriculture, microbes involved in stress mitigation and how to engineer plant microbiome to recruit ideal microbiome at host plants to alleviate effects of abiotic stress and to enhance overall agricultural productivity is reviewed here.