Harnessing the plant-associated microbiome: a sustainable solution for enhancing crop resilience to abiotic stresses and problematic soils

Abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, and heavy metal toxicity pose significant threats to sustainable crop production and global food security. Although modern cultivars perform well under optimal conditions, they often lack the resilience needed to withstand environmental stresses. Emerging evidence highlights the critical role of plant-associated microbial communities, including plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), endophytes, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), in enhancing plant resilience to abiotic stresses and restoring soil health. This review assesses how intensive agricultural practices and abiotic stresses disrupt rhizospheric microbial diversity and function. It then explores promising strategies to restore and engineer beneficial microbial populations, such as sustainable agricultural practices, seed biopriming, selective microbial recruitment, nanotechnology, and precision microbiome engineering. Recent advances in microbial interventions that improve plant growth and productivity in problematic soils are synthesized, emphasizing mitigation of stress impacts via morpho-physiological, biochemical, and molecular pathways. A focused case study on Serendipita indica illustrates its broad-spectrum efficacy in enhancing plant resilience under diverse stress conditions. Finally, current challenges and knowledge gaps that hinder large-scale application of microbial technologies in heterogeneous field environments are critically evaluated, along with proposed future research directions aimed at tailoring microbial solutions to specific stress scenarios. Collectively, these insights position microbiome-based strategies as powerful tools for enhancing crop resilience and soil health, paving the way for a more sustainable agricultural future.