Microbial Transformation of Nutrients in Soil: An Overview

The indiscriminate as well as imbalanced application of inorganic fertilizers and climate change associated land degradation negatively affected the soil’s physical, chemical, and microbiological characteristics, thereby affecting global food production. In soils, various microbial communities are involved in nutrient transformations, thereby determining the mobilization, and fixation capacity of nutrients impacting crop growth and development. Some bacterial and fungal genera are involved in a number of mechanisms such as organic acid production, proton extrusion, critical enzyme production that enables the transformation of unavailable forms of nutrients into available forms. Furthermore, the definitive role of different soil abiotic and biotic components also determines the fate of the nutrient transformation and its availability to the plants by affecting the microbial community structure as well as diversity. Taking sustainability into consideration, the exploitation of microbial inoculants to increase the availability of essential plant nutrients could be a viable alternative option for increasing food productivity without compromising soil quality. In this chapter, we discussed the role of diverse microbial communities in nutrients transformation of major (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur) and minor elements (iron, manganese, and copper), their mechanism, and their key roles in plant and soil health, and the conditions favouring the availability of nutrients are elucidated in detail.