Project R-6300

Het plant-geassocieerde microbioom en zijn rol in het verbeteren van de droogte-tolerantie van planten (Research)

In agriculture almost all over the world, there is one major problem lack of enough water resources. Therefore the research in this field is reasonable, valuable and beneficial. It is known that plant-associated bacteria can help their hosts to adapt and survive unsuitable/disadvantageous environmental conditions. Hence, I will examine if the use of plantassociated bacteria can help for decreasing the effects of drought stress in their host plant. The main objective of this project is to evaluate if plant-associated bacteria can be a solution for the drought problem. The total and cultivable population of bacteria isolated from soil and plant samples from arid regions, are characterized genotypically and phenotypically. This gives us more information about the specific characteristics of plant-associated bacteria in arid regions. Based on these results, the most promising bacterial strains are selected and used for inoculation experiments. At first, multiple grass species inoculated with the selected bacteria are used to evaluate the effect of the chosen strains on the plant's growth under drought stress. In a next step, the strains with the best effects on these grass species are inoculated in durum wheat, an economically important culture. This could be the first step to apply the use of plant-associated bacteria promoting plant growth under drought stress.

01 March 2016 - 28 February 2018