Assessing the effects of biostimulants on spinach through a Field-to-Lab approach for PET imaging
To address the increasing demand for chemical-conscious food production, agricultural practices are shifting toward optimized provisioning strategies, ensuring food security while minimizing environmental impact. These strategies emphasize the judicious use of Plant Biostimulants (PBs) and their eff...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2025-12-01
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| Series: | Smart Agricultural Technology |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772375525005295 |
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| Summary: | To address the increasing demand for chemical-conscious food production, agricultural practices are shifting toward optimized provisioning strategies, ensuring food security while minimizing environmental impact. These strategies emphasize the judicious use of Plant Biostimulants (PBs) and their effectiveness can be quantitatively assessed with minimally invasive imaging techniques like Positron Emission Tomography (PET). However, conventional PET imaging methods remain limited. First, plants studied under hyper-controlled laboratory conditions do not reflect the real-world environmental complexity. Second, plant uprooting for root-administration of radiotracers damages the rhizosphere, undermining the reproducibility of PET-based assessments. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Field-to-Lab protocol that integrates in-field plant growth with laboratory-based digital PET imaging, preserving plant integrity. This approach begins with cultivating plants in farmland until the desired phenological stage. Afterwards, a cylinder is used for coring plants with their surrounding soil, maintaining the root-microbiome interactions. Samples are transported to the laboratory, where radiotracers are applied to the taproot. Following PET imaging, the samples can be returned to the original site and replanted, enabling longitudinal and follow-up studies. The Field-to-Lab approach was validated by evaluating the effects of PBs on spinach. Results from PET imaging were compared with gold-standard agronomic trait analysis. Pairwise comparisons between treated and untreated samples confirmed the robustness of the method, yielding highly significant results (p <0.01 for agronomic analysis, p <0.001 for PET imaging). These findings demonstrate the potential of the Field-to-Lab method as a minimally invasive and reproducible approach for assessing plant responses to biostimulants under realistic environmental conditions. |
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| ISSN: | 2772-3755 |