grafting
Grafting is a horticultural technique that joins plant tissues together, allowing the scion and rootstock to grow as a unified organism. This method is crucial to plant science because it enables asexual propagation of desirable traits while providing researchers with a valuable tool for studying vascular tissue integration, cellular compatibility, and plant physiology.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-05-19
Adding beneficial microbial mixtures to the soil of grafted tomatoes in Mediterranean greenhouses can boost yields by up to 12.6%, but the effect depends heavily on which rootstock-scion combination is used — the wrong pairing can actually reduce yields by over 22%.
Microbial consortia increased yield by 9.1–12.6% in three grafting combinations but reduced yield by 22.4% in one combination (NG/S2), showing strong plant-genotype dependency.
Inoculated microorganisms were rarely detectable in treated soils at significant levels, yet they caused pronounced shifts in the broader rhizosphere microbial community, suggesting indirect ecological cascades rather than direct colonization.
Fungal communities (especially Ascomycota and Basidiomycota) were shaped by both grafting combination and microbial treatment, while bacterial communities responded more strongly to microbial consortia application than to grafting.
