Microbial Inoculants for Enhancing the Biochemical Properties of Withania somnifera Variety Jawahar 20

Abstract

Use of microbial inoculants to enhance the nutrient uptake of any traditional medicinal plant is prerequisite to keep its medicinal value. In order to optimize the microbial inoculants for ashwagandha Withania Somnifera (L) Duna nutrient management, experiments were conducted. The effective strains of Azospirillum, Azotobacter, Bacillus and Pseudomonas isolated and characterized from different medicinal plants of Tamil Nadu were evaluated for ashwagandha under pot-culture condition. The results revealed that combined inoculation of A. lipoferum - AAs-11, Azotobacter - AAz-3, Bacillus - APb-1 and Pseudomonas fluorescens - APs-1 enhanced the biochemical constituents of ashwagandha such as chlorophyll, protein and total alkaloid contents compared to single and other combinations. Further, this bioinoculant package along with panchakavya spray enhanced the rhizosphere microbial activity of ashwagandha. It is concluded that these microbial inoculants in combination with panchakavya is the best organic nutrient management package for ashwagandha

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.100503

Pages

339 - 343

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords