Abstract
Exploration of diverse environmental samples for plant growth-promoting microbes to fulfill the increasing demand for sustainable agriculture resulted in increased use of bacterial biofertilizer. We aimed for the isolation of plant growth-promoting as well as antibiotic sensitive bacteria from bovine manure samples. The basic theme of our study is to highlight potentials of bacteria in manure and the unchecked risk associated with the application of manure i.e. introducing antibiotic-resistant microbial flora, as fertilizer. Fifty-two, morphologically distinct isolates; from eight different manure samples, were subjected to plant growth-promoting parametric tests along with antibiotic resistance. Thirteen antibiotic sensitive bacterial strains with potentials of plant growth promotion further characterized by 16S rRNA ribotyping and the identified genera were Stenotrophomonas, Achromobacter, Pseudomonas, and Brevibacillus. Successful radish seeds germination under sterile in-vitro conditions showed the potential of selected bacterial isolates as plant growth-promoting bacteria. The results of this study confirmed plant growth-promoting characteristics of bovine manures' bacterial strains along with an alarming antibiotic resistance load which comprises 75% of bacterial isolated population. Our study showed distinct results of un-explored manure bacterial isolates for plant growth promotion and flagged ways associated with unchecked manure application in agriculture soil through high load of antibiotic resistant bacteria.