Exploitation of Rhizosphere Microbiome Services

The rhizosphere is a soil hot spot where, due to a tight plant-bacteria interaction, plants recruit a beneficial microbiome, enhancing its density and activity. Rhizosphere microbial communities have the potential to provide several services, and their management and “engineering” can be exploited to set up agro-environmental biotechnologies. In this chapter, after a brief overview of the array of services that we can obtain from rhizosphere beneficial microbiome, two case studies are presented: (i) the exploitation of plant growth-promoting bacteria to increase plant tolerance to drought, potentially able to improve crop yield in arid and semiarid lands, and (ii) the exploitation of plant biostimulation effects over degrading microbial populations in the rhizosphere, sustaining phyto-rhizoremediation approaches in PCB-contaminated soils. In each case study, experimental settings, in vitro and in vivo tests, and the result evaluation and modeling are reported together with a discussion of the critical issues.