All experiments were repeated at least twice. The repeated experiments
were analyzed separately and they showed similar
trends, and therefore, data from only one experiment were
shown. The data on percentage of healthy seedlings were arcsine
transformed and the bacterial population data were transformed
to the logarithmic scale before subjecting to one-way analysis of
variance (ANOVA). Data from individual experiments was subjected
to ANOVA using Statistix 9.0 software (Analytical Software,
Tallahassee, Florida, USA), and if P values indicated a significant
difference (P < 0.05), means were separated by a Fisher’s protected
least significant difference (LSD) test