Obtención sostenible de bioestimulantes a partir de bacterias del ácido láctico, para aumentar la resistencia al estrés de los cultivos en un escenario de cambio climático

Biotic and abiotic stresses are a serious constraint for agriculture, and global warming and climate change can exacerbate it in many world areas. Therefore, sustainable approaches must be implemented to deal with current and future environmentally unfriendly scenarios. The use of plant biostimulants (PB) is a promising tool for coping with environmental stress in agriculture and maintaining crop yields. By definition, a PB is any substance or microorganism applied to plants with the aim to enhance nutrition efficiency, abiotic stress tolerance and/or crop quality traits, regardless of its nutrients content. By extension, PB also designate commercial products containing mixtures of such substances and/or microorganisms. 

Nowadays, PB are mainly obtained by chemical extraction from natural sources of biomass such as plant, seaweed or vermicompost. The chemical extraction of PB from these biomass sources is generally an expensive and environmentally unfriendly process. We propose to obtain PB from lactic acid bacteria (LAB) fermentations for in planta testing under abiotic and biotic stressed conditions. The PB-producing LAB that we propose are recognized as QPS (Qualified Presumption of Safety) by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) and they will be used as cellular factories that secrete PB into the culture media, making unnecessary a further extraction step. Accordingly, the PB-enriched formulations could be directly applied to plants under stress conditions in the appropriate concentration.