Evaluation of promising soybean rhizobia for conferring drought tolerance in soybean under pot

The present investigation was conducted under pot condition with the objective to see the effect of inoculation of soybean, so as to find the most effective strain for growing soybean under moisture stress condition. The experiment was laid out in Factorial Complete Randomized Design taking Soybean crop, Var- Indira Soya9 with 4 (inoculation type) ×2 (Stress type) treatments replicated three times The treatments were inoculation of soybean with the Bradyrhizobium strains from the Department Culture Collection of Microorganisms, i.e., T1(Control), T2 ((local SB-116)), T3 (Bradyrhizobium daqingense), T4 (Bradyrhizobium liaoningense) with normal and moisture stress condition. The study involved characterization of isolates i.e., they were gram negative, positive with respect to catalase test, while in amaylase test (SB 116) was positive, fast growing and Bradyrhizobium were slow in amylase production. Triple sugar iron test showed fermentation of glucose, lactose and sucrose occurred by local strain and fermentation of Glucose only seen in Bradyrhizobium cultures While gas production was observed in Bradyrhizobium liaoningense and there was No H2S evolution was observed in SB 116 and Bradyrhizobium daqingense isolates. Investigation showed that inoculation of soybean with the Bradyrhizobium daqingense strains positively affected soybean growth and yield in normal and moisture stress condition. The treatment of Bradyrhizobium daquingense showed significantly maximum plant height(31.42cm), number of leaves(21.68/seedling), shoot dry biomass accumulation (2.07 g/ seedling), at flowering stage in Soybean under normal and moisture stress condition respectively. Significantly maximum chlorophyll content at flowering stage was recorded under T3 (Bradyrhizobium daqingense) while minimum chlorophyll content was recorded under T1 (Control). It was concluded that the treatment i.e., inoculation of Bradyrhizobium daquingense was most effective and may be adopted to improve germination, vegetative growth and yield of Soybean under normal and stress condition followed by local strain of SB-116. The results of experiments revealed that Bradyrhizobium daquingense was effective in conferring drought tolerance in pot grown soybean”.