Plant growth promoting soil microbiomes and their potential implications for agricultural and environmental sustainability

Abstract

Soil microbial diversity is very important part of ecosystem as it plays a significant role in biogeochemical cycles. Currently, health of environment has been depleted due to growing population of the world and human activities like industrialization, overexploitation of chemical based products in agriculture and urbanization. These problems are now being of major concern of the environmentalist and to fix these problems has become an emergence. Soil microbiomes have been recognized as a potent tool for the sustainable agriculture and environment. Such microbes exhibit hidden talent to overcome the environmental related problem like pollution and soil degradation. In agriculture, soil microbiomes can be used as a biofertilizers over the chemical based products. Soil microbes help in reclamation of soil fertility, alleviation of diverse abiotic stresses, and nutrients stress that help in plant growth and development. Soil microbes help plant for growth via direct mechanisms for enhancing plant growth directly in a sustainable way like solubilization of nutrients (P, K, and Zn), fixation of nitrogen and chelation of iron as well as via indirectly by controlling pathogen growth and alleviating abiotic stress. In environment, beneficial soil microbiomes help in the degradation of environment pollutants like chemical pesticides and industrial waste by enzymatic actions and biosorption techniques. Present review deals with the diversity of soil microbiomes and their role in plant growth promotion and remediation of diverse environmental pollutants for agro-environmental sustainability.