Dhaka 9th October, ‘13. It has indeed been a good piece of news that an Uzbek woman microbiologist, Dilfuza Egamberdieva – a pioneer and a lead scientist at the National University of Uzbekistan, Tashkent has successfully isolated salt tolerant bacterial strains that live in salt-degraded soil. It’s a species of Pseudomonas, namely, P. extremorientalis. They help the rooting process of plants that grow there. The Uzbeki scientist tested the bacteria in experimental settings on the roots of  some major crop plants and obtained 10-15 %  increase in their yields.  The above scientist will soon embark on a project to test the preliminary results in a bid to determine whether in the actual field on a large scale such salt tolerant bacterial strains boost the yield of economically important crop varieties such as wheat, cotton, tomato and cucumber.