Studying the role of endophytic microbial diversity in plant growth is helpful to understand plant-microbe interaction. The present experiment was aimed to investigate the effect of seed endophytes of Artemisia annua on plant biomass and artemisinin content. All the ten bacterial endophytes were found to express a varying degree of plant growth-promoting ability in pots, and of these six better performing were inoculated in A. annua in monocultures and all possible combinations thereof for analyzing the contribution of species identity and species richness on plant growth and artemisinin yield. The significant effect of species identities was found on plant biomass and artemisinin yields by inoculated endophytes. Community identity was found to be a more important factor than species richness in predicting biomass and artemisinin content. Most of the microbial combinations could not enhance plant growth over their monocultures. In this way, it has been demonstrated that there is a significant role of ecological interactions in bacterial mixtures, which are directly linked with the net performance of the community. In the presence of a combination of four endophytes comprising of Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus licheniformis, Burkholderia sp. and Acinetobacter pittii, artemisinin yield was found exceeding all of these microbes as in monocultures. This microbial consortium was able to increase the artemisinin yield of about 658 % over uninoculated control. Application of endophytic microbial consortium, similar to that found in this study, may prove an effective alternative to chemical fertilizers for enhancing artemisinin yield in an economically and eco-friendly manner with the reduced cost of its production.

研究内生微生物多样性在植物生长中的作用有助于理解植物与微生物的相互作用。本实验旨在研究青蒿种子内生菌对植物生物量和青蒿素含量的影响。发现所有十种细菌内生菌在盆中均表现出不同程度的植物生长促进能力，并且这六种表现更好的植物被接种到A. annua中。单种栽培及其所有可能的组合中用于分析物种同一性和物种丰富度对植物生长和青蒿素产量的贡献。通过接种内生菌，物种身份对植物生物量和青蒿素产量具有显着影响。在预测生物量和青蒿素含量方面，发现社区身份比物种丰富度更重要。大多数微生物组合无法通过单培养提高植物的生长。通过这种方式，已证明细菌混合物中的生态相互作用具有重要作用，而细菌混合物与社区的净绩效直接相关。在包含枯草芽孢杆菌，地衣芽孢杆菌，伯克霍尔德菌的四种内生菌的组合下sp。和皮氏不动杆菌，青蒿素的产量超过了单培养中所有这些微生物的产量。该微生物联盟比未接种的对照能够使青蒿素的产率提高约658％。与本研究中发现的类似，内生微生物联合体的应用可能被证明是一种化学肥料的有效替代品，可以经济和环保的方式提高青蒿素的产量，并降低其生产成本。