Isolation and Characterization of Rhizobium Strains from Wild Vetch Collected from High Altitudes in Erzurum-Turkey

Recently, there has been a growing level of interest in environmental friendly sustainable agricultural practices and organic farming systems. Increasing and extending the role of biofertilizers such as Rhizobium would decrease the need for chemical fertilizers and reduce adverse environmental effects. Thus, in the development and implementation of sustainable agriculture techniques, biofertilization is of big importance in alleviating the deterioration of natural and environmental pollution. Besides, the assessment of rhizobial genetic diversity is contributing both to the worldwide knowledge of the biodiversity of soil microorganisms and to the utility of rhizobial collections. Particularly, in the last decades, the use of molecular techniques has been contributed greatly to enhance the knowledge of rhizobial diversity. This study was conducted in order to determine the phenotypic and genotypic characterization of Rhizobium leguminosarum subsp. viciae strains that were isolaled from perennial wild vetch (Vicia cracca) collected from high attitudes (2000-2500 m) in mountains of Erzurum, Eastern Anatolia, Turkey. In this work, rep-PCR (ERIC-, REP- and BOX-PCR) fingerprinting method was used for the genotypic characterization of R. leguminosarum subsp. viciae strains isolated from perennial wild vetch. As a result, a high intraspecies diversity was observed in the rep-PCR (ERIC-, REP- and BOX-PCR) analysis with BOX, ERIC and REP primers between R. leguminosarum subsp. viciae strains.