Alleviation of Salinity Stress in Peanut by Application of Endophytic Bacteria.

The development of salinity affects 7% of the world's land surface, acting as a major constraint to crop productivity. This study attempted to use the co-evolving endophytes of peanut to alleviate salinity stress and enhance the yield of peanut. Diverse and different tissue colonizing endophytes were isolated from peanut and screened by seed germination bioassay imposing gradients of salinity, with two cultivars TG37A (susceptible) and GG2 (moderately resistant), in potted conditions using saline irrigation water.

Characterizing rumen microbiota and CAZyme profile of Indian dromedary camel (Camelus dromedarius) in response to different roughages.

In dromedary camels, which are pseudo-ruminants, rumen or C1 section of stomach is the main compartment involved in fiber degradation, as in true ruminants. However, as camels are adapted to the harsh and scarce grazing conditions of desert, their ruminal microbiota makes an interesting target of study. The present study was undertaken to generate the rumen microbial profile of Indian camel using 16S rRNA amplicon and shotgun metagenomics.

Genetic Gains in Pearl Millet in India: Insights Into Historic Breeding Strategies and Future Perspective.

Pearl millet ( R. Br.) is an important staple and nutritious food crop in the semiarid and arid ecologies of South Asia (SA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Optimization of deficit irrigation and nitrogen fertilizer management for peanut production in an arid region.

Deficit irrigation (DI) has been emerging as an important technique for enhancing crop water productivity (WP). However, advantage of DI under varying nitrogen (N) application rates remains unclear. Field experiments were conducted during 2012-2014 to investigate the impacts of six irrigation levels[FI (full irrigation), DI, DI, DI, DI and DI, with irrigation amount of 100, 90, 80, 70, 60 and 50% of ETc, respectively) and four N application rates (N, N, N and N, with 0, 10, 20 and 30 kg N ha, respectively) on WP, yield, quality, and net economic return of peanut in hot arid region of India.

Disease-Suppressive Soils-Beyond Food Production: a Critical Review.

In the pursuit of higher food production and economic growth and increasing population, we have often jeopardized natural resources such as soil, water, vegetation, and biodiversity at an alarming rate. In this process, wider adoption of intensive farming practices, namely changes in land use, imbalanced fertilizer application, minimum addition of organic residue/manure, and non-adoption of site-specific conservation measures, has led to declining in soil health and land degradation in an irreversible manner. In addition, increasing use of pesticides, coupled with soil and water pollution, has led the researchers to search for an environmental-friendly and cost-effective alternatives to controlling soil-borne diseases that are difficult to control, and which significantly limit agricultural productivity.

Nickel in terrestrial biota: Comprehensive review on contamination, toxicity, tolerance and its remediation approaches.

Nickel (Ni) has been a subject of interest for environmental, physiological, biological scientists due to its dual effect (toxicity and essentiality) in terrestrial biota. In general, the safer limit of Ni is 1.5 μg g in plants and 75-150 μg g in soil.

Exploring the edible gum (galactomannan) biosynthesis and its regulation during pod developmental stages in clusterbean using comparative transcriptomic approach.

Galactomannan is a polymer of high economic importance and is extracted from the seed endosperm of clusterbean (C. tetragonoloba). In the present study, we worked to reveal the stage-specific galactomannan biosynthesis and its regulation in clusterbean.

Spatial structure, parameter nonlinearity, and intelligent algorithms in constructing pedotransfer functions from large-scale soil legacy data.

Pedotransfer function (PTF) approach is a convenient way for estimating difficult-to-measure soil properties from basic soil data. Typically, PTFs are developed using a large number of samples collected from small (regional) areas for training and testing a predictive model. National soil legacy databases offer an opportunity to provide soil data for developing PTFs although legacy data are sparsely distributed covering large areas.

Perceived Climate Variability and Compounding Stressors: Implications for Risks to Livelihoods of Smallholder Indian Farmers.

Micro-scale perspectives are seldom included in planned climate change adaptations, yet farmers' perceptions can provide useful insights into livelihood impacts from interactions between climatic and other stressors. This research aims to understand how climate variability and other stressors are impacting the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Azamgarh district, eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. Data from 84 smallholder farmers were collected using mixed qualitative and quantitative approaches, including interview and participatory methods, informed by multiple stressor and sustainable livelihood frameworks.

DNRA: A short-circuit in biological N-cycling to conserve nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems.

This paper reviews dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) in soils - a newly appreciated pathway of nitrogen (N) cycling in the terrestrial ecosystems. The reduction of NO occurs in two steps; in the first step, NO is reduced to NO; and in the second, unlike denitrification, NO is reduced to NH without intermediates. There are two sets of NO/NO reductase enzymes, i.

Lead Toxicity: Health Hazards, Influence on Food Chain, and Sustainable Remediation Approaches.

Lead (Pb) toxicity has been a subject of interest for environmental scientists due to its toxic effect on plants, animals, and humans. An increase in several Pb related industrial activities and use of Pb containing products such as agrochemicals, oil and paint, mining, etc. can lead to Pb contamination in the environment and thereby, can enter the food chain.

Identification of heterotic groups in South-Asian-bred hybrid parents of pearl millet.

Pearl millet breeding programs can use this heterotic group information on seed and restorer parents to generate new series of pearl millet hybrids having higher yields than the existing hybrids. Five hundred and eighty hybrid parents, 320 R- and 260 B-lines, derived from 6 pearl millet breeding programs in India, genotyped following RAD-GBS (about 0.9 million SNPs) clustered into 12 R- and 7 B-line groups.

The genome size of clusterbean (Cyamopsis tetragonoloba) is significantly smaller compared to its wild relatives as estimated by flow cytometry.

Clusterbean (C. tetragonoloba) is an important, leguminous vegetable and industrial crop with vast genetic diversity but meager genetic, cytological and genomic information. In the present study, an optimized procedure of flow cytometry was used to estimate the genome size of three clusterbean species, represented by C.

Trends and probabilistic stability index for evaluating groundwater quality: The case of quaternary alluvial and quartzite aquifer system of India.

This study proposed a novel groundwater-quality stability index (GQSI), which considers probabilistic estimate of reliability and resilience based on multi-year dataset. The developed index is validated and optimized adopting optimum index factor approach. The vulnerabilities of different groundwater quality parameters are also computed to provide an insight about the deviations of their concentrations from the safe drinking water limits.

Exiguobacterium: an overview of a versatile genus with potential in industry and agriculture.

The bacterial genus Exiguobacterium accommodates many versatile species isolated from diverse environments. Exiguobacterium was described as a genus approximately three decades ago, and now, 17 species, growing over a broad range of temperatures and pH, have been recognized. Various isolates from different niches have been explored for biotechnological and industrial purposes, including enzyme production, bioremediation and degradation of toxic substances released into the environment.

Management of blight of bell pepper (Capsicum annuum var. grossum) caused by Drechslera bicolor.

Sweet or bell pepper is a member of the Solanaceae family and is regarded as one of the most popular and nutritious vegetable. Blight, in the form of leaf and fruit blight, has been observed to infect bell pepper crops cultivated at the horticulture farm in Rajasthan College of Agriculture, Udaipur, India. Based on disease severity, we attempted to curb this newly emerged problem using different fungicides, plant extracts, bio-control agents, and commercial botanicals against the fungus in laboratory and pot experiments.

Methane production, oxidation and mitigation: A mechanistic understanding and comprehensive evaluation of influencing factors.

Methane is one of the critical greenhouse gases, which absorb long wavelength radiation, affects the chemistry of atmosphere and contributes to global climate change. Rice ecosystem is one of the major anthropogenic sources of methane. The anaerobic waterlogged soil in rice field provides an ideal environment to methanogens for methanogenesis.

Spatial assessment of soil organic carbon and physicochemical properties in a horticultural orchard at arid zone of India using geostatistical approaches.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a major indicator of long-term sustenance of agricultural production system. Apart from sustaining productivity, SOC plays a crucial role in context of climate change. Keeping in mind these potentials, spatial variation of SOC contents of a fruit orchard comprising several arid fruit plantations located at arid region of India is assessed in this study through geostatistical approaches.

Budgeting of major nutrients and the mitigation options for nutrient mining in semi-arid tropical agro-ecosystem of Tamil Nadu, India using NUTMON model.

Mining of nutrients from soil is a major problem in developing countries causing soil degradation and threaten long-term food production. The present study attempts to apply NUTrient MONitoring (NUTMON) model for carrying out nutrient budgeting to assess the stocks and flows of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) in defined geographical unit based on the inputs, viz., mineral fertilizers, manures, atmospheric deposition, and sedimentation, and outputs, viz.