Native soil origin influences the symbiotic N fixation effectiveness of chickpea mesorhizobia grown in Australian soils
Date
2023
Authors
Rathjen, J.R.
Zaw, M.
Ryder, M.H.
Zhou, Y.
Lai, T.V.
Denton, M.D.
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Biology and Fertility of Soils, 2023; 60(1):137-151
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JR Rathjen, M Zaw, MH Ryder, Y Zhou, TV Lai, MD Denton
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Abstract
Experiments conducted under controlled conditions can be poor predictors of the feld performance of rhizobial inoculants. In this study, fve feld experiments were conducted over 2 years to evaluate the symbiotic performance of 12 previously identifed strains isolated from Australia and Myanmar soils that had potential to improve chickpea productivity through symbiotic N2 fxation. Strains collected from Australian soils had more than double the survival on seed and up to three times the nodulation at some experimental sites, compared with strains isolated from Myanmar soils. Generally, the newly isolated strains did not perform better than the current Australian commercial strain, Mesorhizobium ciceri CC1192. Although Myanmar strains had poor nodulation of chickpea plants (below nodule rating 1 in most cases) under Australian feld conditions, the plant traits related to growth and symbiosis, such as shoot dry weight (SDW), yield and N fxation, were improved and sometimes equal to the plants inoculated with the Australian strains. Partial correlations showed that plants inoculated with Myanmar strains had greater associations with N fxation measurements (7 plant traits) than nodule number (1 trait), while a symbiotic efectiveness measure of the ratio between N fxation and nodule mass indicated that Myanmar strains are more than 75% more symbiotically efcient compared with the Australian strains. Better seed and soil survival of the Myanmar strains may increase plant nodulation and may lead to a highly efective inoculant strain. This study is one of the frst to report increased symbiotic efciency of N fxation of novel strains compared to a widely utilised commercial chickpea-nodulating strain, on a per nodule basis.
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© 2023, Crown