Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

PLoS ONE

Publication Date

12-1-2018

Abstract

© 2018 Eida et al.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Deserts, such as those found in Saudi Arabia, are one of the most hostile places for plant growth. However, desert plants are able to impact their surrounding microbial community and select beneficial microbes that promote their growth under these extreme conditions. In this study, we examined the soil, rhizosphere and endosphere bacterial communities of four native desert plants Tribulus terrestris, Zygophyllum simplex, Panicum turgidum and Euphorbia granulata from the Southwest (Jizan region), two of which were also found in the Midwest (Al Wahbah area) of Saudi Arabia. While the rhizosphere bacterial community mostly resembled that of the highly different surrounding soils, the endosphere composition was strongly correlated with its host plant phylogeny. In order to assess whether any of the native bacterial endophytes might have a role in plant growth under extreme conditions, we analyzed the properties of 116 cultured bacterial isolates that represent members of the phyla Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria and Firmicutes. Our analysis shows that different strains have highly different biochemical properties with respect to nutrient acquisition, hormone production and growth under stress conditions. More importantly, eleven of the isolated strains could confer salinity stress tolerance to the experimental model plant Arabidopsis thaliana suggesting some of these plant-associated bacteria might be useful for improving crop desert agriculture.

ISSN

1932-6203

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Volume

13

Issue

12

Disciplines

Life Sciences

Keywords

Actinobacteria, agriculture, Arabidopsis thaliana, article, bacterium isolate, Bacteroidetes, clinical article, desert, endophyte, Euphorbia, Firmicutes, hormone synthesis, human, human cell, microbial community, nonhuman, nutrient, Panicum, phylogeny, plant growth, Proteobacteria, rhizosphere, salt stress, Saudi Arabia, soil, Tribulus terrestris, Zygophyllum, Arabidopsis, bacterium, desert climate, metabolism, microbiology, physiology, Tribulus, Actinobacteria, Arabidopsis, Bacteria, Bacteroidetes, Desert Climate, Endophytes, Euphorbia, Firmicutes, Panicum, Proteobacteria, Rhizosphere, Saudi Arabia, Soil Microbiology, Tribulus, Zygophyllum

Scopus ID

85058405053

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series

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