About Azospirillum
Azospirillum bacteria can influence the growth and productivity of cereals and many other plant species, making it possible to consider them to be nonspecific growth promoters (Bashan et al., 2004).

Owing to these properties, azospirilla are very attractive from the standpoint of use in agriculture and forestry and also for the purpose of solving such environmentally important problems as the cleanup of soils from man-made pollutants and the prevention of soil erosion (Bashan et al., 2004; Lucy et al., 2004).

Azospirillum-based commercial inoculants, serving to increase the productivity of a range of agriculturally important crops, include Azo-Green, used for turf and forage crops; Zea-Nit and Azogreen-m, used for maize; and Biopron, used for vegetables (Lucy et al., 2004; del Amor et al., 2008).

The Azospirillum genus was described by Tarrand et al. (1978). At present, 20 azospirillar species with validly published names are known: A. brasilense (Tarrand et al., 1978), A. lipoferum (Tarrand et al., 1978), A. halopraeferens (Reinhold et al., 1987), A. largimobile (Dekhil et al., 1997), A. doebereinerae (Eckert et al., 2001), A. oryzae (Xie and Yokota, 2005), A. melinis (Peng et al., 2006), A. canadense (Mehnaz et al., 2007), A. zeae (Mehnaz et al., 2007а), A. rugosum (Young et al., 2008), A. picis (Lin et al., 2009), A. thiophilum (Lavrinenko et al., 2010), A. formosense (Lin et al., 2012), A. humicireducens (Zhou et al., 2013), A. fermentarium (Lin et al., 2013), A. soli (Lin et al., 2015), A. agricola (Lin et al., 2016), A. ramasamyi (Anandham et al., 2019), A. griseum (Yang et al., 2019), and A. palustre (Tikhonova et al., 2019).

Hydrocarbon-oxidizing properties have been investigated in 32 Azospirillum strains isolated from uncontaminated rhizospheres. Resistance or degradative activity toward petroleum hydrocarbons was found in 18 strains. The degradation of crude oil by A. brasilense SR80 was studied in detail by Muratova et al. (2005).
Staff members
  • Professor Olga Turkovskaya, D. Sc. (Biol.), Head of Collection
  • Ekaterina Dubrovskaya, Ph.D. (Biol.), Curator
  • Anna Muratova, D. Sc. (Biol.), Bacteriologist
  • Sergey Golubev, Ph.D. (Biol.), Bacteriologist
  • Anastasia Bondarenkova, Ph.D. (Biol.), Bacteriologist