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That Line of research has thought, as a response to the limited knowledge that there is nowadays about the mechanisms of action of the amino acid extracts that are applied, by radicular way, as farming biostimulants.
Unfortunately, the expansion in the use of that kind of biostimulants is not accompanied of a correct clarification of its action in the plants, but only of a brief exposition of its undoubting beneficial effects.
It is important to underline that, in the farming practice, it is usual to justify the positive responses related to the application of those products with the role that they are assigned to, in the interior of the plants, to some of the amino acids that make them up, even if it has not been proved that exogenously applied amino acids come to make up the same metabolic routes that the ones synthesized by the plant.
Nowadays, we lack of objective tools that allow us to evaluate the quality of those kinds of products according to their origin and composition and, consequently, we lack of enough knowledge to optimise their application. That situation is a handicap when it comes to foreseeing if a product of this kind is more or less effective, especially if we meet the huge diversity of composition and origin that they present.
In that context, our global aim is, therefore, to clarify the mechanisms of action on which the responses of the plants to the application of amino acids by radicular way are based. According to it, we could establish objective parameters with which we could evaluate the farming quality of the products in that typology and so optimising their particular application, attending both the characteristics of the farming and the characteristics of the product.
Within the global goal of that Line of Research, an initial work has been developed, in the framework of an agreement University-Company, that has originated a Doctoral Thesis presented in June of 2001 by the Dr. Nicholas with the title "Influence of amino acids incorporated to nutritive dissolutions in the growth and mineral nutrition of tomato plants developed in controlled conditions". |
