Abstract
Crop cultivation in salinated soils is one of the major agricultural challenges world-wide. The aim of the present work was to improve tomato fruit yield by protecting these plants against soil-borne pathogens and to promote their growth in salinated soil. Twenty one percent of the tomato plants grown in salinated Uzbek soil showed disease symptoms, indicating the presence of tomato pathogens in this soil. The dominant pathogen, which causes tomato foot and root rot, was isolated and was identified as F. solani. Fifty two bacterial strains from strain collections of five different institutes were evaluated for their ability to protect plants against tomato foot and root rot after bacterization of the seeds and infestation of soil with the isolated F. solanipathogen. Infestation of the soil with F. solaniresulted in an increase of the percentage of diseased plants from 21 to 46. Priming of seedlings with the eight selected bacterial strains,reduced this proportion to as low as 19 %. In addition, in the absence of an added pathogen, threestrains namely P. putida 1T1, P. extremorientalisTSAU20 and Stenotrophomonas rhizophila ep10 showed a significant stimulatory effect on tomato plant growth, increasing the dry weight of whole tomato plants up to 27% in comparison to the non-bacterized control. The strains also increased tomato fruit yield in a greenhouse varying from 14%to 22 %. We conclude that many beneficial bacteria isolated from plants growing on non-salinated soil are perfectly able to promote plant growth and control plant diseases in salinated soil. In other words, salination caused by a possible future climate change does not seem to be a threat for the application of presently used plant-beneficial bacteria. In addition, our results show that the dogma that beneficial strains should be isolated from the plant and climate on/in which they should be applied is not valid: all our strains were isolated from plants other than cucumber and came from cold or moderate climates.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) for sustainable agriculture |
| Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 2nd Asian PGPR Conference, Beijing, China, 21-24 August, 2011. |
| Place of Publication | Auburn |
| Publisher | Asian PGPR Society |
| Pages | 75-79 |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |