Role of Endophytic Microbiome in Agricultural Crop Protection

Endophytic microorganisms, including bacteria, actinobacteria, and fungi, are the open secrets of nature residing from thallophytes to vascular cryptograms and are predominantly known to protect the plants from biotic–abiotic stress ensuring their survival in odd environmental conditions by growth promotion, modulation of phytohormone response, and also protection from pathogenic microorganisms, nematodes, weeds, oxidative stress, etc. Their role in the protection and maintenance of agriculturally valuable cash crops has been studied in detail in the past few decades, and it has been revealed that they are involved actively in the eradication of diseases from plants, ensure good productivity even in drought, salt-stressed, cold-freeze climate, and in heavy metal-contaminated soil as well as reduce post-harvest decay. Practices like mycofumigation for storage crops, seeds, fruits, and also during the time of transportation of crop products increase the shelf life of agricultural crops and offer a biologically safe measure of protection devoid of any harmful xenobiotic component use. This is an additional benefit of endophytic populations in the rescue of crop plants. Factors that shape the endophytic communities are both intrinsic and extrinsic like hosts’ genotypic constituents, plant–plant interactions, and host–endophyte interaction. This chapter summarizes the potential role of endophytic microbiome both fungi and actinobacteria of diverse plant taxa for the protection of host plants from pathogenic crop loss and promotion of plant growth.