AUTHOR=Malhotra Sarthak , Mishra Vandana , Karmakar Swagata , Sharma Radhey S. TITLE=Environmental Predictors of Indole Acetic Acid Producing Rhizobacteria at Fly Ash Dumps: Nature-Based Solution for Sustainable Restoration JOURNAL=Frontiers in Environmental Science VOLUME=5 YEAR=2017 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2017.00059 DOI=10.3389/fenvs.2017.00059 ISSN=2296-665X ABSTRACT=
Coal fly ash dumps represent contaminated sites that pollute the environment and affect the health of living organisms. Vegetation development at ash dumps is an ecological solution to minimize the environmental threats of ash; however, low content of nutrients, organic matter and moisture pose a challenge for plant growth at the dumps. Bacterial indole acetic acid (IAA) facilitates plant recruitment and growth, more crucially in degraded ecosystems. Bacteria with different levels of IAA determine the plant-bacterial interactions as pathogenesis or symbiosis, therefore, form microbial functional types. Understanding plant-soil feedback and identifying environmental predictors of bacterial IAA producers at ash dump would help in improving biostimulation strategies for vegetation development. Therefore, to evolve a nature-based solution for vegetational restoration of ash dumps, we analyzed the role of geochemical factors, host species and age of dump on the assembly of rhizobacterial IAA functional types of naturally colonizing grasses (