Microbial Inoculants and Their Role in Abiotic Stress Management

Along with exponentially burgeoning population, abiotic stresses like temperature, drought, heavy metal toxicity, and salinity are complementing the continuous pressure on agricultural productivity. Plants have developed various stress tolerance mechanisms, but there is still scarcity of food supply. To overcome this constraint, plant microbiome as plant growth-promoting microbiome (PGPM) has been explored lately, which shows enormous metabolic potential under abiotic stresses. PGPMs including rhizobacteria and mycorrhizae regulate stress alleviation by indirect and direct mechanisms, such as stimulating the production of phytohormone, siderophore, antioxidants, and phosphate solubilisation and reducing ethylene levels. They are employed in the field either solid, liquid, metabolite, or polymeric formulations, depending on the crop requirements. In this chapter, we explored the nature of abiotic stress-induced plant-microbiome interaction in terms of crop protection for translating higher productivity.