Proposal of bioassays as a tool for screening biostimulant properties of protein hydrolysates from animal waste materials.

摘要

Biostimulants are products which, alone or mixed with other fertilizers, contribute to improve plant growth by exploiting different physiological processes. Aim of this paper is the examination of flexible and generic analytical methods in order to screen putative biostimulant properties of protein hydrolisates from animal waste materials. The use of bioassays was chosen because biostimulants enhance specific metabolic processes, and their activity can be detected by measuring their action on the metabolism of living organisms. Four different bioassays and four different doses were applied to check out the efficiency of the products and results were obtained through the combination of the outcomes from each test at each dose tested. The results obtained demonstrate that bioassays are sensitive to the treatments applied. These methods have been shown to be useful as a preliminary screen of putative protein hydrolisate-based biostimulants, with no care to the specific physiological processes they achieve.