article · Plants
High soil salinity severely restricts rice growth and crop productivity. Combining plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria, specifically Pseudomonas koreensis and Bacillus coagulans, with nano-silicon provides an effective approach to counteracting this stress. When tested on both salt-sensitive and salt-tolerant rice varieties, this combined treatment significantly enhanced soil enzyme activity, root length, leaf area, photosynthetic pigments, potassium uptake, and water retention. Simultaneously, it lowered sodium accumulation, electrolyte leakage, and proline levels. These improvements were driven by elevated antioxidant enzyme activities, which curbed oxidative damage by reducing hydrogen peroxide and malondialdehyde. Crucially, applying both rhizobacteria and nano-silicon enabled the salt-sensitive variety to outperform untreated salt-tolerant rice in grain numbers, grain weight, nutrient uptake, and overall yield, effectively mitigating the damaging effects of saline soil.
Soil salinity poses a major challenge to agriculture, limiting the yield of essential staple crops like rice. Identifying sustainable interventions that allow crops to flourish in saline conditions helps protect global food supplies. Showing that bio-inoculants and nano-silicon can help sensitive varieties surpass untreated tolerant ones provides a practical route to improving crop resilience and maintaining productivity in degraded soils.
This research points toward applications in crop nutrition and soil conditioning, specifically the development of combined microbial inoculants and nano-silicon treatments for rice farmers operating on saline soils. The primary users would be agricultural input manufacturers and cereal growers. Based on the abstract, the work represents applied and tested experimental research, which would require commercial formulation and field validation before it could be considered near-market.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
The growth and development of rice face many issues, including its exposure to high soil salinity. This issue can be alleviated using new approaches to overwhelm the factors that restrict rice productivity. The objective of our investigation was the usage of the rhizobacteria (Pseudomonas koreensis and Bacillus coagulans) as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPRs) and nano-silicon, which could be a positive technology to cope with the problems raised by soil salinity in addition to improvement the morpho-physiological properties, and productivity of two rice varieties (i.e., Giza 177 as salt-sensitive and Giza 179 as salt-tolerant). The findings stated that the application of combined PGPRs and nano-Si resulted in the highest soil enzymes activity (dehydrogenase and urease), root length, leaf area index, photosynthesis pigments, K<sup>+</sup> ions, relative water content (RWC), and stomatal conductance (gs) while resulted in the reduction of Na<sup>+</sup>, electrolyte leakage (EL), and proline content. All these improvements are due to increased antioxidant enzymes activity such as catalase (CAT), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and peroxidase (POD), which decreased hydrogen peroxide (H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub>) and malondialdehyde (MDA) under soil salinity in rice plants compared to the other treatments. Combined application of PGPRs and nano-Si to Giza 177 significantly surpassed Giza 179, which was neither treated with PGPR nor nano-Si in the main yield components (number of grains/panicles, 1000 grain weight, and grain yield as well as nutrient uptake. In conclusion, both PGPRs and nano-Si had stimulating effects that mitigated the salinity-deleterious effects and encouraged plant growth, and, therefore, enhanced the grain yield.
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DOI: 10.3390/plants11243431
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