At present fertilizer has become essential to modern agriculture to feed the growing population. Though chemical fertilizers increase crop production; their overuse has hardened the soil, decreased fertility, strengthened pesticides, polluted air and water, and released greenhouse gases, thereby bringing hazards to human health and environment as well. Due to the adverse effect of chemical fert...

The Gram-positive bacterium Paenibacillus larvae is the etiological agent of American Foulbrood. This bacterial infection of honey bee brood is a notifiable epizootic posing a serious threat to global honey bee health because not only individual larvae but also entire colonies succumb to the disease. In the recent past considerable progress has been made in elucidating molecular aspects of host...

We assessed a collection of 47 fluorescent Pseudomonas spp., some with known biological     control activity against certain soil-borne phytopathogenic fungi such as, Macrophomina phaseolina, Rhizoctonia solani, Phytophthora nicotianae var. parasitica, Pythium sp. and  Fusarium sp. in vitro and the potential to produce known secondary metabolites such as, siderophore, HCN and protease. The resu...

Cooperation in nature is ubiquitous, but is susceptible to social cheats who pay little or no cost of cooperation yet reap the benefits. The effect such cheats have on reducing population productivity suggests that there is selection for cooperators to mitigate the adverse effects of cheats. While mechanisms have been elucidated for scenarios involving a direct association between producer and ...