Figure 8.

The effect of rhizobacterial treatment on the relative disease indices (DI) of sheath blight infection in IR64 variety of rice seedlings. Five days old rice seedlings were treated with individual rhizobacterial consortia (as described in Table S1), and the treated plants were grown at 24 °C under 16–8 h day-night cycle for three days. Following this, the seedlings were inoculated with R. solani AG1-IA, as described in the method section. The rice seedlings thus infected with the fungus were grown further for two days, and the infection symptoms were scored as the disease index (DI). The DI of all the treated samples was calculated and compared with that of the control to evaluate the effect of the respective consortia on inducing resistance of rice seedlings. Error bars represent the standard deviation calculated from three independent experiments.