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REVIEW article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Microbial Symbioses
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1540274
This article is part of the Research Topic Plant Microbiome: Interactions, Mechanisms of Action, and Applications, Volume III View all 22 articles
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With the growing human population worldwide, innovative agricultural development is needed to meet food security needs. However, this has inadvertently led to problematic irrigation practices and overuse of agrochemicals. Such practices can exacerbate soil salinization, which prevents plant growth. As a progressively widespread and escalating problem, soil salinization poses a major threat to global food security. Compared with the traditional use of microalgae or microorganisms that act on plant growth, microalgae-microorganism symbiosis has significant advantages in promoting plant growth. Microalgae and microorganisms can work together to provide a wide range of nutrients required by plants, and they exhibit nutrient complementarity, which supports plant growth. Here, the development potential of microalgae-microbial symbiosis for enhancing plant salt tolerance was investigated. Our review demonstrated that the metabolic complementarity between microalgae and microorganisms can enhance plant salt tolerance. The diversity of a microalgae-microorganism symbiotic system can improve ecosystem stability and resistance and reduce the incidence of plant disease under salt stress. These systems produce bioactive substances (e.g., phytohormones) that promote plant growth, which can improve crop yield, and they can improve soil structure by increasing organic matter and improving water storage capacity and soil fertility. Exploiting the synergistic effects between microalgae and beneficial microorganisms has biotechnological applications that offer novel solutions for saline agriculture to mitigate the deleterious effects of soil salinity on plant health and yield. However, there are several implementation challenges, such as allelopathic interactions and autotoxicity. To make microalgae-bacteria consortia economically viable for agricultural applications, optimal strains and species need to be identified and strategies need to be employed to obtain sufficient biomass in a cost-effective manner. By elucidating the synergistic mechanisms, ecological stability, and resource utilization potential of microalgae-microbial symbiotic systems, this review clarifies salt stress responses and promotes the shift of saline-alkali agriculture from single bioremediation to systematic ecological engineering.
Keywords: Saline agriculture, salt tolerance, Alkali stress, synergistic inoculation, Algae-Microbial-Plant Interactions
Received: 05 Dec 2024; Accepted: 31 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ren, Li, Wang, Yu, Wang, Qin and Cui. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Hong-Li Cui, Key Laboratory of Coastal Biology and Biological Resources Utilization, Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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