Soil microbiome for enhanced crop productivity

Abstract

Current agricultural practices demand for low-input technologies with an objective to scale down the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides usage in order to enhance the sustainability in food production and restore ecosystem functioning. Regardless of much understanding of the essential role played by the soil microbiome in agriculture, we still have a limited knowledge of the multifarious response of microbial heterogeneity. To explore this covert attribute of soil microbial diversity, there is a need to focus upon the infinite ways by virtue of which soil microbiome helps in sustainable agriculture. There is limited access to highly diverse and dynamic communities of microbiome in soil due to inability of culture techniques in laboratory. With the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques and high-throughput analysis, researchers gained new opportunities to investigate undetermined composition of soil microorganisms. Among rapidly growing field of research, the role of metagenomics is crucial in studying uncultured microbes to comprehend the actual microbial diversity and pertinent cooperation, evolution, and functions in diverse environment. Soil microbiologists are putting efforts in analyzing the phylogenetic diversity of soil niches and subsequently attempting to describe the functions of these soil inhabitants at trophic levels for improvement of soil fertility and productivity for the future generation.