Potential of Plant Growth-Promoting Rhizobacteria for Ensuring Soil Fertility and Plant Health

To feed the ever-increasing global population with the existing resources, improvement in food production using plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) is gaining momentum nowadays. This association is found useful when the soil arability is challenged by abiotic stresses. Modifying the plant–microbe symbiotic relationship to provide sustainability under stress conditions therefore emerges as an alternate technology to the development of stress-tolerant transgenic crops by genetic engineering. Furthermore, the application of excess doses of chemical fertilizers to support high-yielding seeds in modern agriculture led to environmental pollution by contaminating soil and water resources, and depleting other essential nutrients, organic matter, and symbiotic microflora in soil, thus deteriorating soil health. Along with the modification of physiological and structural characteristics of soil, the suitable application of PGPR can activate the “induced systemic tolerance” in plants against various abiotic stresses. This chapter summarizes the way of utilizing these PGPR in the form of biofertilizers shedding the interactive molecular crosstalk between plants and microbe under saline conditions, and how could they help overcome the challenges to achieve a reproducible effect of biofertilizer as found in the laboratory, need to be verified in the fields.