ATATÜRK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL FACULTY, vol.53, no.1, pp.51-57, 2022 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Out of stress management strategies used for drought, inoculation of plant growth-promoting bacteria holds a major position due to sustainable, low-cost, and versatile properties. The plant growth-promoting bacteria, particularly containing 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid deaminase activity, have a critical location since they restrict ethylene synthesis under stress conditions thereby improving stress tolerance index. In this experiment, seeds of two wheat cul-tivars were primed with three bacterial strains and seedlings were grown under stress and non-stress conditions. The study was laid out in completely randomized factorial design with three replications. While plant growth achieved top performance with synthetic fertilizer in 80% of field capacity, increasing drought stress restricted the efficiency of synthetic fertilizer. In contrast, plant growth-promoting bacteria-priming promoted plant growth and dry matter accumulation under optimum and drought conditions. Increase of dry matter accumulation in treatments as control plants varied between 17.1% and 57.1% under 80% of field capacity while it changed between 0.2% and 35.1% under drought conditions. TV126C and TV24C induced stress tolerance index in sensitive and tolerant cultivars under drought and optimum conditions. In conclusion, it is considered that bio-priming with plant growth-promoting bacteria involving 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid deaminase enzyme activity might be an effective and sustainable management strategy to drought stress in wheat cultivation.