article · CABI Agriculture and Bioscience
Soil microorganisms, including plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, are vital for maintaining soil health, biodiversity, and ecosystem productivity. Both groups establish beneficial relationships with plant roots that significantly enhance the uptake of vital nutrients. Harnessing these natural soil organisms supports sustainable agricultural production and aligns with broader green economic growth strategies. By improving nutrient acquisition, these microbes boost plant development, improve crop yields, and help plants tolerate both biotic and abiotic stresses. Furthermore, utilising these biological mechanisms offers a viable pathway to reduce dependency on synthetic agrochemicals, which often destabilise ecological systems. Synthesising current knowledge highlights the diverse, multifunctional roles that beneficial bacteria and fungi perform in supporting long-term agricultural sustainability.
Modern agriculture heavily relies on chemical inputs that can harm ecosystem balance and degrade soil health. Understanding and deploying beneficial soil bacteria and fungi offers a natural alternative. By improving nutrient absorption and stress resistance biologically, farming systems can maintain or improve crop yields while minimising environmental damage and promoting more sustainable food production.
The insights support the development of biofertilisers and microbial inoculants for agricultural producers seeking to reduce chemical inputs. Potential users include commercial growers and input manufacturers targeting sustainable farming. Because this work is a synthesis of existing literature, it represents conceptual and foundational knowledge rather than a newly tested product, indicating that specific commercial formulations require local adaptation and field validation.
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Abstract Background Soil microorganisms including rhizobacteria and fungi play a key role in soil health, biodiversity and productivity of natural and managed ecosystems. Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) associated with plant roots enhance the uptake of nutrient and improve productivity. Similarly, mycorrhizal fungi particularly, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), form a mutualistic association with plants and enhance nutrients uptake and consequently promote plant growth and productivity. Methods Here we show how harnessing beneficial soil microorganisms like PGPR and AMF with their positive effect on plant development can contribute to the green and clean economic growth strategy. Results Through a review of the state-of -art knowledge in this area we demonstrate that this approach can improve uptake of nutrients, enhance plant growth, yield and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stress. We argue that this approach can reduce the need for agrochemicals that destabilizes the ecological system. Conclusions This review provides a state-of-the-art synthesis of the knowledge generated so far and insight into the multifunctional strategies employed by AMF and PGPR toward ensuring sustainable agriculture.
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DOI: 10.1186/s43170-023-00168-0
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