Microbial management of crop abiotic stresses: Current trends and prospects

Abstract Abiotic stresses like drought, extreme temperatures, poor edaphic factors, elevated CO2, floods, submergence, anoxia, disproportionate insolation, and cyclones are the major challenges limiting the world’s agricultural production. Among the many approaches that are attempted to mitigate the effect of abiotic stresses, the use of beneficial plant microbes and their integration in agricultural production is explored as one of the potential approaches for enhancing the tolerance of crops to abiotic stresses. The effective and rationalized use of plant microbiomes requires a comprehensive understanding of the key aspects like microbial community composition, microbial colonization, and host-microbial interactions. The past few years have seen mounting interest in the manipulation of plant-associated microbiomes employing the vertically transmitted microbiota for the generation of new phenotypes or the new plant varieties. Moreover, due to the breakthrough advancements in Next Generations Sequencing (NGS) platforms, our ability to study the plant microbiome has improved radically. Using amplicon and shotgun metagenome sequencing approaches, more and more information about the complexity of plant microbiota, insights into plant-microbiome interactions, core microbiomes have been generated. In this chapter, we discuss the current state of plant microbiome research and summarize the salient research finding which may form the basis for effective agricultural microbiome manipulations and management strategies for sustainability of food production.