In a field experiment conducted in a Mediterranean area of inner Sicily, durum wheat was inoculated with plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), or with both to evaluate their effects on nutrient uptake, plant growth, and the expression of key transporter genes involved in nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) uptake. These biotic associations were studie...

Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) are bacteria capable of promoting plant growth by colonizing the plant root. For a long period PGPR were mainly used for assisting plants to uptake nutrients from the environment or preventing plant diseases. Phytoremediation is a new and promising approach to remove contaminants in the environment. But using plants alone for remediation confronts man...

Field experiments were conducted to evaluate growth promotion and induced systemic disease resistance (ISR) in cucumber mediated by plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) with and without methyl bromide soil fumigation. In both fumigated and nonfumigated plots, numbers of cucumber beetles, Acalymma vittata (F.), and the incidence of bacterial wilt disease, caused by the beetle-transmitted ...

Soil microbial communities are often difficult to characterize, mainly because of their immense phenotypic and genotypic diversity. In the last ten years, a number of PGPR that have been identified has seen a great boost, mainly because the role of the rhizosphere as an ecological unit has gained importance in the functioning of the biosphere and also because mechanisms of action of PGPR have b...

Studies were done to evaluate specific strains of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) for induced resistance against cucumber mosaic cucumovirus (CMV) in tomato. In greenhouse experiments where plants were challenged by mechanical inoculation of CMV, the percentage of symptomatic plants in the most effective PGPR treatments ranged from 32 to 58%, compared with 88 to 98% in the nonbacter...