Potassium-Solubilizing Bacteria Isolation And Cultivation Technology: The Transformation From Culturable Preference To Ecological Authenticity

Abstract

Potassium-solubilizing bacteria can activate soil mineralized potassium, making them an important genetic resource for developing
microbial potassium fertilizers. However, traditional isolation and cultivation techniques have long faced two core challenges: the selective
medium used in plate cultivation leads to the omission of many difficult-to-culture strains that rely on natural microenvironment signals; the
laboratory-optimized nutrient-rich and pure cultivation conditions are disconnected from the real ecological niche of the rhizosphere, which
is poor in nutrients and involves multiple interactions, resulting in unstable field application effects of efficient strains. This paper systematically reviews the development history of the isolation and cultivation techniques of potassium-solubilizing bacteria, from the establishment
of selective media in the resource discovery stage, the optimization of cultivation conditions in the efficiency improvement stage, to the intervention of synthetic biology and fermentation engineering in the precise design stage, revealing the fundamental tension between culturable
preferences and ecological reality. Looking to the future, in situ cultivation technology can simulate the natural microenvironment to obtain
difficult-to-culture functional strains; high-throughput screening platforms can achieve a transformation from inefficient isolation to largescale exploration; synthetic community strategies transcend the single-strain thinking and construct a collaborative system composed of multiple functional bacteria. The technological innovations in these three dimensions complement each other, promoting the research on potassiumsolubilizing bacteria from laboratory simulation to a more ecologically adaptable technical system.