Halophyte – Rhizobacteria for Crop Adaptation to Climate Change

Soil salinity is a serious and growing problem for worldwide agriculture. Plants growing in salt impacted soils are prone to the combined detrimental effects of suboptimal soil conditions. Within this scenario, halophytes have been regarded both as a rich source of potential new crops and as a biotool for salt phytoremediation strategies. There is a considerable diversity of halophytes, they accumulate high salt concentrations in their tissues, have been tested as vegetable, forage, and oilseed crops in agronomic field trials and have a high-yield potential when irrigated with seawater. Rhizobacteria can facilitate the growth of plants or their adaptation to different stresses using a wide range of different mechanisms. This is very important taking into consideration that Climate Change will lead to some environmental changes, and crop adaptation will be crucial. However, there are very few studies in this regard using halophytes.

A germination plate assay was conducted with the halophyte Salicornia ramossissima seeds and 5 rhizobacteria consortiums isolated from halophyte species. Different conditions of CO2, salinity and temperature were used, according to predicted conditions for Climate Change. Germination rate, biomass and fluorescence were recorded. Two of the inoculants produced improved germination rate and biomass production.

We are witnessing the emergence of a nascent natural root resource to adapt native crops and ecosystems while facing current environmental challenges.