A Holistic Approach for Enhancing the Efficacy of Soil Microbial Inoculants in Agriculture: From Lab to Field Scale

Microbial inoculants can be an efficient tool to manage the soil and plant microbiomes providing direct beneficial effects, and for modulating native soil and plant-associated microbiota. However, the application of soil microbial inoculants as biofertilizers and biopesticides in agriculture is still limited by factors related to their formulation, application method, and the knowledge about the impact and interactions between microbial inoculants and native soil and plant host microbiomes. The review is thus describing and discussing three major aspects related to microbial-based product exploitation, namely: i) the discovery and screening of beneficial microbial strains; ii) the opportunities and challenges associated with strain multifunctional features; iii) the fermentation and formulation strategies also based on the use of wastes as growth substrates and the technical and regulatory challenges faced in their path to field application. All these issues are addressed in activities performed by the EXCALIBUR project (www.excaliburproject.eu), which aims to expand the current concept about microbiomes interactions, acknowledging their interactive network that can impact agricultural practices as well as on all living organisms within an ecosystem.