• Due to the correlation of above- and below-below ground variety, a high microbial diversity can be expected.

• The rhizosphere has tremendous amounts of carbon sources that are available to the heterogeneous microbial communities in soil to produce different kinds of organic acids.

• Many earlier studies relied on dilution plate counts to enumerate and describe microbial populations.

• Symbiotic selection could be based on a broad involvement of wild plant germplasm, which has retained the high adaptive potential of different types of plant microbial interactions: root nodular symbioses (Provorov Tikhonovich, 2003), rhizosphere associations (Kravchenko et al., 1993) and VAM (Jakobi et al., 2000).

• Nanotechnological devices for CEA that provide scouting capabilities could tremendously improve the growers ability to determine the best time to harvest the crop, the vitality of crop, and food security issues, such as microbial or chemical contamination.

• It was found that the essential oil of bergamot was most effective in reducing microbial growth, followed by the essential oil of orange.