Microbe mediated alleviation of drought and heat stress in plants- current understanding and future prospects

The contemporary changes in global climate scenarios due to fast-evolving environmental extremities have adversely affected crop plants, resulting in drastic losses in the worldwide agricultural sector. To cope with environmental stressors like drought and heat, plants have evolved their sophisticated machinery to alleviate such perturbations. A strategy in this stress alleviation mechanism involves plant-associated microbes as ubiquitous organisms endowed with the capacity to enhance plant resilience. The use of microbial inoculants for conferring stress tolerance has gained much attention in recent decades to develop stress-resilient crops. This review highlights the specific microbes enriched upon exposure to drought and heat stress in crop plants, their application as bioinoculants to mitigate the stress regimes, the advantages of using microbe-based approaches, and discusses the mechanisms behind it. Furthermore, it also focuses on the challenges and prospects associated with the field applicability of various microbial inoculants and provide future direction for developing microbial formulations to achieve climate-smart agriculture.