“…So far, a number of bacterial isolates from the rice phyllosphere have been characterized (Elbeltagy et al, 2000;Madhaiyan et al, 2007Madhaiyan et al, , 2009Mano et al, 2007) and potential beneficial interactions of phyllosphere bacteria with rice plants, such as plant growth promotion, for example, by bacterial nitrogen fixation or plant hormone production, and protection against pathogens have been studied (Madhaiyan et al, 2004;Maliti et al, 2005;De Costa et al, 2008;Yang et al, 2008;Chinnadurai et al, 2009;Pedraza et al, 2009).…”