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Stimulating plant growth naturally
As the world’s population grows, a key challenge of the 21st century will be to meet food and energy demands adequately while limiting the inevitable pressure placed on the environment. Thus the development of new bio-inspired stimulants for plant growth will be a clean and economical solution.
The chemists [1] from Orsay are specialised in the synthesis of complex carbohydrates. In collaboration with biologists, they have developed a method for producing natural stimulants [2] for plant growth : the "Nod factors" and the compounds that resemble them.
Indeed, plants alone are not able to fix the atmospheric nitrogen (N2) they need to perform the synthesis of their proteins. Leguminous plants rely on bacteria for that purpose. This plant/bacteria symbiosis is characterized by the emergence of nodules on the roots of the plant that hosts the bacteria : they feed on the carbohydrates synthesized by the plant and "in exchange" they provide nitrogen to the plant in a form it is able to use, much like a fertilizer would do.
A key stage in this symbiosis is the formation of nodules ; this is where one finds the Nod factors, oligosaccharides (complex carbohydrates) that carry a lipid, produced by the bacteria to initiate the process. By synthesizing these growth stimulants and using them in agriculture, one can increase yields by more than 10% and reduce the quantities of fertilizer. This method can be applied to many crops but also to the growth of trees like acacias, which will help with the reforestation of semi-arid areas.
Institut de chimie moléculaire et des matériaux d’Orsay, CNRS-Université Paris 11
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