Laurence Galhaut receives the Best Poster Award at the 4th Biostimulant World Congress in Barcelona

Laurence Galhaut, assistant and doctoral student at Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech - ULiège received last November the prize for the best poster at the 4th Biostimulant World Congress in Barcelona.

"Nowadays, agriculture tends to preserve the environment and to limit mineral fertilizers use. In the recent years, manufacturers are developing products with diverse compositions (seaweed extracts, humic acids, microbial inoculants, protein hydrolysates, …) considered as stimulating substances that for example improve plant nutrients absorption. These products are referred to as biostimulants. This term has been the subject of many discussions in recent years - in which our laboratory has also actively participated as an expert - and, last June, the European Parliament and Council adopted a new regulation on fertilizing products where a plant biostimulant is defined as follows:

Plant biostimulant

A plant biostimulant shall be an EU fertilising product the function of which is to stimulate plant nutrition processes independently of the product’s nutrient content with the sole aim of improving one or more of the following characteristics of the plant or the plant rhizosphere:

nutrient use efficiency,

tolerance to abiotic stress,

quality traits,

or availability of confined nutrients in the soil or rhizosphere.

As the definition of biostimulants refers to its action rather than its composition, there is a need to set up tools to evaluate their bioactivity. It is in this context that our work takes place. We are developing laboratory tests to assess whether potential biostimulant substances meet at least one of the definition claims. We first focused our research on assays related to the nutrients use efficiency and more precisely on the measurement of plant traits linked to the nutrient uptake efficacy, such as root system architecture and rhizosphere acidification".