“…The bacterial plant microbiome is important for plant growth and health, increasing nutrient acquisition (Knoth et al, 2014;Pankievicz et al, 2015;Alori et al, 2017;Chhabra and Dowling, 2017), improving abiotic stress tolerances (Cura et al, 2017;Lata et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2019), protecting against pathogens (Bulgarelli et al, 2013;Pandey et al, 2019), modulating plant hormones (Santoyo et al, 2016;Ali et al, 2017), and detoxifying environmental pollutants (Afzal et al, 2014;Hussain et al, 2018). There is a strong and steadily increasing interest in microbial endophytes of plants (Rho et al, 2017) and how they could be harnessed to improve sustainability in agriculture, forestry and bioenergy production (Busby et al, 2017;Doty, 2017).…”