Innovative metabolic reprogramming in rice: unlocking drought resilience through microbial consortia interaction and...

Rice is a global staple food facing climate change challenges, such as drought, salinity, alkalinity, and heat stress. Proteomics, genomics, gene expression, and metabolic changes use adaptation strategies, but translating them into field conditions remains a challenge. This review highlights the role of microbial consortia in drought adaptation, crop resilience, and food security through several drought mitigation strategies. Plants use a "cry for help" strategy to restructure their microbiome, alleviate stress, and improve health and nutrition. Understanding the complex feedback between microbes and plants is crucial for future crop drought resilience. Microbial consortia eliminate stress, such as drought stress, by acclimatizing plants to various tactics, enhancing water uptake. Techniques like UPLS/GC detect profiling and plant growth regulators influenced by microbial consortia under water scarcity. Metabolomics can identify secondary metabolites, chemical signaling, and governing systems in plant groups, contributing to drug development and drought tolerance in cereal crops, such as rice and wheat. Key microbial consortia candidates have been identified for nitrogen-fixing bacteria, phosphate-solubilizing bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, phytohormones, siderophores, and biofortifying crops with nutrients, such as zinc. Future research is needed to understand molecular pathways and identify microbial species that improve drought tolerance. Key challenges include addressing drought effects on plants, understanding plant-microbial consortia functions, and advancing multiomics, synthetic communities (SynComs), and host-mediated microbiome engineering for drought-resilient agriculture.