Unravelling the plant growth promoting potential of bacterial members of the barley rhizosphere microbiota

ABSTRACT We generate a bacterial collection from the rhizosphere of cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare L. ssp. vulgare) to assess taxonomic distribution of culturable member of the barley microbiota and their plant growth-promoting potential. We retrieve strains belonging to the dominant phyla of the plant microbiota, i.e., Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria and gathered evidence they code for genes implicated in nitrogen fixation, hydrogen cyanide channels and phosphate solubilisation. Here we present an initial comparative genomic analysis of the collection revealing that plant growth-promoting potential of the culturable barley bacterial microbiota appears to have a relatively broad phylogenetic base while retaining some strain-specificity.