Sustainable Agriculture: Rare-Actinomycetes to the Rescue

Abstract

The failure of sustainable and agricultural intensifications in saving the ecosystem/public health has caused a paradigm shift to microbiome resource engineering through sustainable approaches. As agricultural intensification systems prioritize synthetic input applications over environmental health, sustainable intensification fails to define the end point of intensification, giving room for the application of “intensification” over “sustainability” to suit farmers’ needs. However, sustainable agricultural practices through microbiome resource services have been well harnessed and appreciated for their significant role in plant health and disease management due to their ability to secret agroactive metabolites with notable functionalities in a cooperative manner or as bioinoculants. The complexity of a cooperative microbiome and the uncontrollable nature of its numerous influencing parameters as well as the non-specificity associated with bioinoculant application, results in the direct utilization of agroactive compounds to obtain greater preventive efficiency. In this regard, the known bacterial trove has been seriously ransacked, yet there exists an inexhaustible bank of unknown compounds, which are conserved in Actinomycetes. However, the rare Actinomycetes group has received less attention than other plant growth-promoting bacteria; thus, the possibility exists that the Actinomycetes may encode novel useful metabolites. To unravel the possible uses of these metabolites for phytoprotection, smart culture-based techniques and genometabolomics technology have been applied. Hence the aim of this review is to express the sustainable nature of agro-antibiotics or biopesticide from these bacterial resources for the resolution of phytopathogenic havoc that reduces crop productivity.