Research Projects

Microorganisms play a crucial role in maintaining the ecological balance of the biosphere, and climate change-induced biotic and abiotic stresses are significantly affecting agricultural crop production. To enhance crop productivity and mitigate stress conditions, it is essential to exploit potential microbial candidates, such as yeast, as inoculants. Yeasts are unicellular fungi that rapidly proliferate on simple carbohydrates and can exert beneficial activities such as plant growth promotion, biocontrol of pathogenic fungi/bacteria, and soil aggregate formation. The diversity of soil yeasts can be attributed to the diverse habitat structure of microsites in soils. Assessing the functional diversity of soil yeasts could help exploit this microbiome for sustainable crop production under drought stress. soil yeasts also produce a variety of secondary metabolites, which could be a promising key for sustainable crop production. The current proposal aims to study the drought mitigating potential of plant growth-promoting soil yeasts (Candida tropicalis and Pichia kudriavzevii) by screening them for drought-mitigating traits such as exopolysaccharides (EPs), 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate deaminase activity (ACC deaminase), volatile compounds, stress responsive gene regulation, and root architecture modifications. Potential yeast isolates will be tagged with marker gene (EGFP) and their interaction with crop plants will be assessed. The strain will be assessed for large-scale production, formulation, shelf-life, and bioefficacy tests to develop as a yeast inoculant for soil and plant health improvement and drought mitigation.