Plant rhizosphere bacteria engage in very complex relationships with the host plants, often beneficial to the plants. Rice varieties endemic to the brackish water ecosystem have been found to harbor unique bacteria and their presence and activities have been correlated to some of the adaptive responses of plants to salinity. Understanding the relationship between such bacteria and the rice plant may help in understanding salinity tolerance in context of the microbial interactions, and may even aid development of bioinoculants that would help plants to survive salinity.

Pokkali rice, a known saline tolerant variety cultivated in the brackish water areas of Kerala, is used as a model to study such interactions and studies are conducted on the molecular rhizosphere ecology and interactions of a novel genus Pokkalibacterplantistimulans (isolated from the Pokkali rhizosphere and demonstrated to support the rice growth under saline conditions) with Pokkali.