TL;DR
This article systematically reviews the effects of drought stress on plant rhizosphere microbial communities, analyzes its direct and indirect regulatory effects on microbial functions, and deeply explores the rhizosphere microorganism-mediated regulatory network underlying plant drought resistance.
Plant–microbe interaction is an essential component of sustainable agriculture which promotes plant growth, improves nutrient assimilation, and enhances plant resistance to various environmental stress conditions. Beneficial microbes, such as rhizobacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, and endophytes, boost plant functions using molecular signaling, phytohormone modification, systemic resistance induction, and pathogen antagonism. The use of new multi-omics techniques has uncovered complicated communication systems mediated by root exudates, recognition via receptors and microbial community functioning. In this review, the current understanding of the molecular basis of plant–microbe associations and their roles in combating drought, salinity, temperature, and heavy metals stresses is summarized. Special attention is paid to the promising approach based on microbiome engineering, synthetic communities and next generation biofertilizers for climate-smart agriculture. The main difficulties associated with environmental fluctuations, host specificity, inconsistency at field scale, and the lack of omics and bioinoculant validation guidelines are also highlighted.
This review highlights that wheat actively recruits and reshapes stress-resilient microbial communities, particularly members of Bacillus and Pseudomonas which promote stress adaptation by regulating reactive oxygen species (ROS), phytohormone homeostasis, nutrient acquisition, and stress-responsive signalling pathways.
Extreme temperatures, drought, and salinity are among the most detrimental abiotic stressors limiting global plant productivity, and their frequency has intensified under climate change. These escalating pressures underscore the need for sustainable biological strategies that enhance plant resilience to climate-induced abiotic stresses. Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) have emerged as a promising, eco-friendly solution due to their ability to optimize rhizospheric processes that strengthen plant adaptive capacity. PGPR improve nutrient acquisition, maintain ionic homeostasis, modulate phytohormone signaling, and regulate ethylene levels through ACC deaminase activity. They also stimulate antioxidant defenses, promote osmolyte and exopolysaccharide synthesis, and enhance root system development—key traits that collectively alleviate drought, salinity, and heat stress. Recent research demonstrates that co-inoculation, multi-strain microbial consortia, and synthetic communities designed using multi-omics approaches significantly enhance PGPR stability, colonization, and functional effectiveness under field conditions. Additionally, nanotechnology-enabled formulations and smart delivery systems are emerging as innovative tools to improve PGPR survival and targeted release in harsh environments. This review synthesizes current insights into PGPR-mediated stress mitigation, highlights technological innovations that support their application, and outlines pathways for integrating PGPR into climate-resilient, sustainable agricultural systems to safeguard crop productivity amid escalating environmental stress.
Terrestrial plants are frequently exposed to fluctuating abiotic stresses throughout their life cycle, and mycorrhizae can markedly enhance host plant resistance to such challenges. This review summarizes recent advances in our understanding of how arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) enhance host plant tolerance through multiple mechanisms. AMF promote stress tolerance through diverse mechanisms, including nutrient solubilization, polyamine accumulation, reactive oxygen species scavenging, physiological improvements, maintenance of ultrastructural stability via membrane integrity, accumulation of osmolytes such as trehalose, proline, polyamine, and glycine betaine, and activation of antioxidant enzymes to alleviate oxidative stress. While substantial progress has been made, the underlying AMF-mediated stress tolerance mechanisms remain underexplored. Future research should focus on dissecting how signaling pathways interact to regulate gene expression in mycorrhizal plants and elucidating the complex regulatory networks operating at the plant-AMF interface. We also outline key research directions for clarifying plant-AMF interactions under stress conditions, as current research highlights the use of beneficial soil microbes to mitigate stress and enhance crop resilience.
Drought stress threatens the ecological functions and economic value of grasses, posing a major challenge to their sustainable production. Plants co-evolve with rhizosphere microbial communities, sometimes described as the plant's second genome, that can contribute to drought adaptation. Drought alters root architecture, hormonal and redox regulation and belowground carbon allocation, thereby modifying the quantity and composition of root exudation and reshaping the rhizosphere environment. This review uses the rhizosphere dialogue as an integrative framework to link these plant responses with microbial recruitment and subsequent feedback to the host. We summarise three linked stages of this dialogue: drought-induced changes in root exudation; microbial recruitment and colonisation through chemotaxis, attachment, biofilm formation, and root colonisation; and microbiome-mediated feedback that improves plant water relations, hormonal and redox homoeostasis, nutrient acquisition, and root function. We highlight microbial extracellular polymeric substances, 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate deaminase, and microbial volatile organic compounds as key mediators of drought alleviation. We then discuss how this framework may inform rational synthetic microbial community (SynCom) design, microbiome-informed breeding, artificial intelligence and machine-learning assisted strain prioritisation, rhizosphere legacy effects, and real-time monitoring. Future work should distinguish active exudate-mediated recruitment from drought-driven environmental filtering and integrate multi-omics, plant genetics, functional validation, and multi-location field trials to determine whether rhizosphere dialogue can become a predictive framework for climate-resilient grass production.
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