On 19-21 September 2022, Pietro Peroni, University of Bologna, presented the following abstract as a poster at the 51st national conference of the Italian Society of Agronomy (SIA), in Padua:
“Potential Of Biostimulants To Increase Sorghum Bicolor Biomass Production And Phytoremediation Efficiency” Pietro Peroni, Walter Zegada-Lizarazu, Rossella Mastroberardino, Andrea Monti.
Introduction
The cultivation of biomass crops on contaminated lands is becoming more and more relevant thanks to the possibility of producing biomass with low ILUC risk, i.e. avoiding taking land away from food production, providing for the decontamination of polluted areas in an economic way and avoiding secondary pollution phenomena (Muthusaravan et al. 2018). Sorghum bicolor is one of the most promising species for the biomass production and it is considered capable of absorbing some widely diffused heavy metals in the aerial biomass, such as Pb, Cd, Cu and Zn (Zhuang et al. 2009) that can be precipated in transformation plants (Gong et al. 2018).
Not being an hyperaccumulator species, the effectiveness of the process depends on the quantity of the biomass produced (Lima et al. 2019). Currently, in order to improve the efficiency of phytoremediation process research is particularly focused on the use of microorganism and biostimulants capable of improving the physiological wellbeing of crops and the bioavailability of heavy metals for roots. (Yan et al. 2020). The current study, carried out in the framework of the GOLD project, reports the results obtained by testing 6 different treatments (M, B1, B2, MB1, MB2, C) on sorghum in a greenhouse trial. The objective was to identify the best treatments able to increase the production of sorghum biomass and the relative uptake of heavy metals from the soil.
The full abstract can be downloaded here.
