“…These rhizobacteria are known as effective disease-fighters, helping agricultural productivity and sustainability (Bhat et al, 2022;Gamalero and Glick, 2022;Gowtham et al, 2022). The PGPR that flourishes in the rhizosphere improves plant growth by various mechanisms, such as nitrogen fixation, production of phytohormones, 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate (ACC) deaminase (Sagar et al, 2020), exopolysaccharides (EPS; Sayyed et al, 2015Sayyed et al, , 2019Ilyas et al, 2020), siderophores (Nithyapriya et al, 2021;Srivastava et al, 2022), antioxidants (Gowtham et al, 2022), osmoprotectants (Ilyas et al, 2020), nutrient uptake (Jabborova et al, 2020(Jabborova et al, , 2022Deepranjan et al, 2021;Kapadia et al, 2021;Sarkar et al, 2021), and induced systemic resistance (ISR; Reshma et al, 2018;Desai et al, 2023) in stressful conditions. These PGPR can also influence plant metabolism and gene expression directly, as well as the expression of root proteins, root morphology, and root growth (Vacheron et al, 2013;Kalam et al, 2020;Basu et al, 2021;Hamid et al, 2021;Ahmad et al, 2022;Lobhi et al, 2022).…”