Azospirillum spp. and Related PGPRs Inocula Use in Intensive Agriculture

Abstract

From the beginning of plant domestication, extensive farming has been the main strategy adopted by agriculture to produce large amounts of food. However, plant production in a continuously deteriorating environment and an exponentially growing human population are important factors that challenge agriculture nowadays. Moreover, agricultural lands are currently expanded to marginal, arid, or semiarid regions where crops are exposed to abiotic stresses as drought and salinity, this last negative factor aggravated by different anthropogenic actions. In addition, contemporary society requires from agriculture to provide food products with high market and nutritional qualities as fruits and vegetables, which should also be free of agrochemicals. In consequence, it is imperative to develop friendly, noncontaminant, sustainable, and energy-saving plant production strategies. In this regard, vegetable production by intensive farming in controlled environments is continuously expanding. On the other hand, recent reports show that plant inoculation with plant-growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) could improve vegetable quality and yield under abiotic stresses, and to reduce the pressure that current agriculture exerts on the environment. Within this context, our main purpose was to describe a number of techniques aimed to study the plausible beneficial effects of Azospirillum and related PGPR inoculation on vegetable growth and nutritional quality, with emphasis on the promotion of antioxidant activity.

Agricultural and Forestry Importance of Microorganism-plant Symbioses: A Microbial Source for Biotechnological Innovations

“…In general, the most widely studied PGPR genera are Bacillus, Pseudomonas, and Azospirillum [8,10], which are the ones with the most commercial interest due to their ease of cultivation in vitro and the proven beneficial effects on plants. Due to these properties, some PGPR (Bacillus, Pseudomonas, Azotobacter, Azospirillum, Bradyrhizobium, and Mesorhizobium) have been included as part of inoculant formulations, alone or in combination with other rhizobacteria or with AMF [11].…”