Pot experiments
Four-week-old tomato seedlings cv. mobile were transplanted to pots containing ster- ilised sandy loam field soil amended with fungal culture (1:1). In order to add bacterial inocolum, the soil around the tomato roots was carefully moved aside without damag- ing. The inoculum suspensions were poured around the roots. In control pots, sterile water was poured for comparisons. Pots were kept under greenhouse conditions for wilt incidence for one month. To gain the accurate results, assessment was done after 10 and 20 days using five disease scales reported by Chen et al. (1995): 0 = no disease; 1 = 0– 25% of the leaves withered; 2 = 26–50% of the leaves withered; 3 = 61–75% of the leaves withered; 4 = 76–100% of the leaves withered. The disease index was calculated using the following formula: Σ [(P × DC) × 100]/(T × 4), where P = plants per class, DC = disease index and T = total number of plants.
Percent efficacy of disease control: [(Disease index in untreated control − Disease index in treated plants)/Disease index in untreated control] × 100 was also calculated based on Purkayastha et al. (2010). Plant growth promoting traits of applied strains were also measured after 40 days.