Advance Techniques Used for Decoding the Hidden Language Used During Plant–Microbe Interaction

A myriad of microbes inhabiting in soil may communicate with host plant in a variety of manner in their entire life cycle that may be categorized as neutral, mutual, commensal, beneficial, or harmful relationships. With the rapidly proliferating population and increased food demand versus supply ratio, the conventional and chemical-based agriculture practices to achieve goals of sustainable agriculture are quite far in economical and environment-friendly terms. For the past few decades, plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPRs) are being used to enhance the crop production, improve the nutrient content of crops, bioremediation, or biocontrol of pathogens. Researchers found that PGPRs have immense potential as bioinoculants, but there are very few biofertilizers used at commercial scale. It would be extremely important to untangle the complex interaction between plant and microbes for the development of a successful biofertilizer and to ultimately enhance crop production. Earlier cultivable techniques were used mainly focusing on a very small portion of microbes present in rhizosphere, but the last few decades are dedicated for the development of robust, accurate, precise, and high-throughput techniques like recent microscopy (SEM, TEM, CLSM), omics techniques (metagenomics, metaproteomics, metabonomics, etc), next generation sequencing (NGS), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR). Here, the present chapter focuses on the advanced techniques and cutting-edge technologies that have opened new avenues in making a clear-cut understanding of interactions taking place among PGPRs and the host plant.