Exploitation of Rhizosphere Microbiome Services

The rhizosphere is a soil hot spot where, due to a tight plant-bacteria interaction, plants recruit a beneficial microbiome, enhancing its density and activity. Rhizosphere microbial communities have the potential to provide several services, and their management and “engineering” can be exploited to set up agro-environmental biotechnologies. In this chapter, after a brief overview of the array of services that we can obtain from rhizosphere beneficial microbiome, two case studies are presented: i) the exploitation of plant growth promoting bacteria to increase plant tolerance to drought, potentially able to improve crop plants yields in arid and semi-arid lands, ii) the exploitation of plant biostimulation effect over degrading microbial populations in the rhizosphere, sustaining phyto-rhyzo-remediation approaches in PCB contaminated soils. In each case study the experimental settings, the in vitro and in vivo tests, the result evaluation and modelling are reported, together with a discussion of the critical issues.