Bacterial inoculants are known to possess plant growth promoting abilities and have potential as liquid biofertilizer application. Four phytase producing bacterial isolates (phytase activity in the range of 0.076–0.174 U/mL), identified as Advenella species (PB-05, PB-06, and PB-10) and Cellulosimicrobium sp. PB-09, were analyzed for their plant growth promoting activities like siderophore production, IAA production, HCN production, ammonia production, phosphate solubilization, and antifungal activity. All isolates were positive for the above characteristics except for HCN production. The solubilization index for phosphorus on Pikovskaya agar plates was in the range of 2–4. Significant amount of IAA (7.19 to 35.03 μg/mL) production and solubilized phosphate (189.53 to 746.84 μg/mL) was noticed by these isolates at different time intervals. Besides that, a greenhouse study was also conducted with Indian mustard to evaluate the potential of these isolates to promote plant growth. Effect of seed bacterization on various plant growth parameters and P uptake by plant were used as indicators. The plant growth promoting ability of bacterial isolates in pot experiments was correlated to IAA production, phosphate solubilization, and other in vitro tests. On the basis of present findings, isolate PB-06 was most promising in plant growth promotion with multiple growth promoting characteristics.

Phytase-producing bacteria (PPB) is being investigated as plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) to improve the phosphorus (P) nutrition and growth of plants grown in soil with high phytate content. Phytate is dominant organic P forms in many soils and must be hydrolyzed to be available for plants. Indian mustard (Brassica juncea) is a plant with economic importance in agriculture and phytoremediation, therefore biotechnological tools to improve growth and environmental stress tolerance are needed. In this study, we isolated and characterized PPB from Himalayan soils and evaluated their effect on growth and P uptake by B. juncea under greenhouse conditions. Sixty five PPB were isolated and based on phytate hydrolysis, three efficient PPB were chosen and identified as Acromobacter sp. PB-01, Tetrathiobacter sp. PB-03 and Bacillus sp. PB-13. Selected PPB showed ability to grow at wide range of pH, temperature and salt concentrations as well as to harbour diverse PGPR activities, such as: solubilization of insoluble Ca-phosphate (193-642 μg ml(-1)), production of phytohormone indole acetic acid (5-39 μg ml(-1)) and siderophore. Tetrathiobacter sp. PB-03 and Bacillus sp. PB-13 showed 50 and 70 % inhibition of phytopathogen Rhizoctonia solani, respectively. Greenhouse potting assay also showed that the bacterization of B. juncea seeds with Tetrathiobacter sp. PB-03 and Bacillus sp. PB-13 significantly increased the biomass and P content in 30 days old seedlings. This study reveals the potential of PPB as PGPR to improve the growth of B. juncea.

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Nowadays, the harsh industrial environment remains one of the vital challenges for an effective deployment of wireless technologies in factories to promote the industrial upgrade. In this study, a complete solution is proposed for robust radio communications in indoor factories. Herein, measurement setups are integrated with industrial mobile facilities, e.g. an automated guided vehicle and a mobile robot. Calibration is advised for accurately revealing an industrial radio environment. A hybrid sequential design strategy is used to enhance the efficiency of the measurement campaign. This further leads to a surrogate modelling based radio environment map, which facilitates a holistic view and evaluation of the radio quality of service over the target shop floor. In addition, an over-dimensioning heuristic is proposed to guarantee that every target location can be wirelessly covered by at least two access points (APs). Moreover, the smart switch mechanism dynamically powers on/off the over-dimensioned APs, so as to ensure full coverage even at the presence of physical disturbance. The investigation on two real factories and the coverage prediction tool WHIPP further demonstrates the solution's effectiveness. Eventually, a rich outlook is drawn for the roadmap towards an artificially intelligent system for robust industrial wireless communications.