Metatranscriptomics driven isolation of Tea root associated bacteria and their evaluation for drought tolerance properties.

Plant root microbiome plays the key role in plant health maintenance during conducive as well as a stressed situation and their population dynamics (culturable and non-culturable) varies with the surrounding environment. Therefore, culturable microbial strains associated with drought tolerant plants are explored and mobilized as input to sustain other plant growth during drought situation. However, the non-culturable microbes that represent substantial proportions of total microbiome are not explored yet for their beneficial role during stress condition. Drought adversely affects tea plant growth and has become one of the major limiting factors for tea production in India as well as worldwide. It is hypothesized that the tea plants growing in drought condition (for the last 20-25 years) would harbor certain bacterial taxa that facilitate maintenance of tea physiology during water stress condition. Isolation of such microbes and their subsequent evaluation of properties associated with osmotic stress tolerance would facilitate sustained tea physiology during water stress condition. The earlier metagenomics-based study reported 80% of tea rhizospheric bacteria and 54% of root endophyte as non-culturable.  The proposed research would attempt to isolate bacterial taxa from yet non-culturable group. For this, metatranscriptomic profiling of drought stressed tea rhizosphere would be carried out to understand active bacterial metabolic pathways which will facilitate information on major nutrient composition being metabolized by the rhizospheric microbiome and its metabolic precursors. Thereafter, selective enrichment of metabolic precursor in the isolation media would enable to culture the presently non-culturable members of tea rhizosphere.