Role of PGPR in Conferring Drought Stress Tolerance in Rice

Rice is one of the widely popular staple foods across the globe. Abiotic stress is known for its devastating effect on crop plants. Drought amid the other abiotic factors has received constant attention as it causes loss in productivity and thus disrupts the efforts toward food security. Drought stress causes havoc in rice productivity as it harms the rice plants at all the developmental stages and the reproductive stages. Concurrently, the effective measures to reduce the loss in yield and development in rice due to drought conditions mostly consist of long-term research efforts. Therefore, it has become an utmost necessity to search for convenient alternatives that are efficient, less time-consuming, cost-effective, and environment friendly. Thus, attention has been paid to Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPRs), which stands out as an excellent measure to reduce the stress posed by drought. PGPR could be used for increasing the tolerance mechanisms in drought-affected rice crops and could be established as an excellent choice of the mitigation strategy. We aim to summarize the research efforts of this field in this chapter.