**6. Conclusion and prospects**

Climate change tends to increase the global temperatures, which have devastated impacts on agricultural production. Furthermore, the rapid industrialization and increase in the world population have put a lot of burden on agriculture to produce more food and feed from the existing crop varieties, and land and water resources. Drought tolerance in plants is a multigenic trait and can be enhanced in a meaningful way by adoption of multi-pronged strategy. Endophytic and rhizospheric microbes have well-established mechanisms to support plants in nutrient acquisition, stress tolerance, and disease resistance. In this connection, microbes with high potential of osmolytes and siderophore production, phosphate solubilization, and nitrogen assimilation should be selected for plant inoculation. Also, the microbial induction of the genes involved in ROS scavenging may help plants to overcome the negative effects of drought stress. Inoculation experiments should involve mixtures or consortium of microbes rather than individual microbial strains. Some recent experiments have used mixtures of diverse microbial strains, and it was suggested that a microbial consortium would have broad impacts on the plant growth and productivity under drought stress. Furthermore, the modern and state-of-the-art gene sequencing and editing tools could be used in genomic studies, which would involve identification, cloning, and functional characterization of target genes in the selected microbes with high potential of conferring drought stress tolerance. These efforts could be combined with approaches of system biology studies, which would further explore the microbial-mediated alterations in metabolic profiles under drought stress. An important consideration would be to combine the complex genetic networks with those of metabolic events, which are lying at the core of plant-microbe interaction under environmental stresses including drought stress.
