Figure 1

Potential use of soil microbes in sustainable crop production. The beneficial soil micro-organisms sustain crop production either as biofertilizers [19] or symbiont [17]. They perform nutrient solubilisation which facilitate nutrient availability and thereby uptake [20, 21]. It improves the plant growth by advancing the root architecture [26]. Their activity provides several useful traits to plants such as increased root hairs, nodules and nitrate reductase activity and [36]. Efficient strains of Azotobacter, Azospirillum, Phosphobacter and Rhizobacter can provide significant amount of available nitrogen through nitrogen cycling [22]. The biofertilizers produced plant hormones, which include indole acetic acid (IAA), gibberellins (GA) and cytokinins (CK) [25, 44]. Biofertilizers improve photosynthesis performance to confer plant tolerance to stress [44] and increase resistance to pathogens [45] thereby resulting in crop improvement [18].