act quickly to engage in extensive research to develop strategies tocope with abiotic stresses, including the development of heat anddrought-tolerant plant varieties, shifting crop calendars, and recalibrationand optimization of resource management practices.Microorganisms have always played a critical role in alleviating abioticstress in plants, imparting properties to their host that reducesthe perception of the stress (avoidance) or enhances tolerance tothe stress [14–16]. Despite this extensive coevolutionary history,we currently utilize (at least knowingly) only a fraction of themicrobes that could enhance plant growth and stress resistance.We propose that evaluation of the impact of microbial inoculationsto alleviate stresses in plants could be integrated with plant breedingprograms. Thus, a measure of plant responsiveness to symbiosiscould be scored as a phenotype during the breeding process,instead of evaluation later, almost as an afterthought. Here we havereviewed recent work on the role of microorganisms in amelioratingdrought stress in crops and subsequently outline (a) culture-dependentmicrobiological techniques and (b) culture-independentmolecular techniques for microbiome analyses and screening ofdrought-tolerant microbes (Fig. 1).In Protocol 1 we describe a pipeline for microbiome