The Interaction Between Plants and Bacterial Endophytes Under Salinity Stress

Abstract

Salinity leads to a decline in agricultural production and an increase in the percentage of salinity-affected land which exceeds 20% of the world’s cultivated land. Endophytes are a class of endosymbiotic microorganisms widely distributed among plants and colonize intercellular and intracellular spaces of all plant compartments and do not cause any apparent infection or significant morphological change. Furthermore, endophytes have many beneficial effects on host plants including adaptation to biotic and abiotic stress such as salinity through different activities including the production of scavengers like reactive oxygen species that are produced in plants when exposed to salinity, production of ACC deaminase enzyme which is responsible for lowering the levels of ethylene in the plant, nitrogen fixation, production of compatible solutes, antibiotics, and phytohormones. The use of endophytic microbes is of particular interest in the development of agricultural applications that ensure improved performance of crops under salinity stress.