Fusarium wilt is caused by the fungal pathogens, Fusarium oxysporum or Fusarium solani. It is a devastating disease that affects many important food and vegetable crops and a major source of loss to farmers worldwide. Initial strategies developed to combat this devastating plant disease include the use of cultural, physical and chemical control. None of these strategies have been able to give the best results of completely ameliorating the situation except for the cultural method which is mainly preventive. A good knowledge of the nature, behaviour and environmental conditions of growth of the disease agent is very important to controlling the disease development in that case. Biological control has been shown to be an environmentally friendly alternative. It makes use of rhizospheric and endophytic microorganisms that can survive and compete favourably well with the Fusarium wilt pathogen. They include plant growthpromoting rhizobacteria PGPR such as Bacillus spp. and Pseudomonas spp.. For PGPR to control or inhibit the growth of the Fusarium wilt pathogen, they make use of mechanisms such as indole acetic acid production, siderophore production, phosphate solublilization, systemic resistance induction and antifungal volatile production among others.

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Bambara groundnut (BGN) is an underutilized legume commonly found in sub-Saharan Africa. It thrives in marginal soils and is resistant to drought stress. Several studies have been carried out on the nutritional properties of BGN, but very little is known about the effects of plant growth changes and development on rhizosphere bacterial dynamics and function. This study reports on the bacterial dynamics and function in the bulk and rhizosphere soils of BGN at different growth stages (vegetative, flowering, pod-filling, and maturation stages). Aside from the maturation stage that shows distinct community structure from the other growth stages, results obtained showed no significant differences in bacterial community structure among the other growth stages. At a closer level, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, and Acidobacteria were dominant in rhizosphere soils at all growth stages. The bulk soil had the least average phyla abundance, while the maturity stage was characterized by the highest average phyla abundance. Rubrobacter, Acidobacterium, and Skermanella were the most predominant genus. It was observed from the analysis of operational taxonomic units that there was significant change in the bacterial structure of the rhizosphere with a higher abundance of potential plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria, at the different growth stages, which include the genera Bacillus and Acidobacterium. Biomarker analysis revealed 7 and 4 highly significant bacterial biomarkers by linear discriminant analysis effect size and random forest analysis at the maturation stage, respectively. The results obtained in this study demonstrated that the bacterial communities of BGN rhizosphere microbiome dynamics and function are influenced by the plant’s growth stages.