Congratulations to Devesh Singh on his recent award

ISCB symposium

Devesh Singh won an award for his work entitled “Bioirrigation, facilitated via a common mycorrhizal network, supports the water relations of finger millet in intercropping system with pigeon pea during drought”.

The award was granted at the ISCB International Symposium on “Enhancing the farm income through biotechnological innovations and socio-economic research in India” held on 3rd and 4th December 2018, at New Delhi, India. Devesh won second prize in the poster competition.

Abstract from the poster

Hydraulic lift is an important ecological process where roots passively lift up water from deeper soil layers and release it into upper layers. Hydraulically lifted water can be redistributed to a neighbouring plant. In agroecological terms this process is referred to as “biorrigation”. The role of beneficial microbial inoculants such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) as facilitating agents for bioirrigation has often been suggested but is not yet well understood. In this study, we designed an experiment to test the effect of bioirrigation and biofertilisation on the water-relations of an intercropping system that included pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) as a deep-rooting plant to bioirrigate the neighbouring shallow rooted finger millet (Eleusine coracana). The results show that AMF plays an important role in hydraulic redistribution, and the shallow rooted finger millet was only able to utilize hydraulically lifted water in the presence of AMF. We propose that by designing suitable intercropping system based on bioirrigation, there is a great potential for reducing drought induced crop yield loss in arid and semi-arid tropics.