Improved growth of pea, lettuce, and radish plants using the slow release of hydrogen sulfide from GYY-4137.

Justin M Carter,Ned B Bowden,Aliasger K Salem,Erin E Irish,James P Grace,Eric M Brown

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208732

Abstract

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a key gasotransmitter in agriculture and has been reported to increase the growth of plants in the first two weeks and to mitigate the effects of environmental stressors. GYY-4137 is widely used in these studies because it slowly releases H2S, but there is disagreement as to whether it requires enzymes to release H2S. In this article we describe the release of H2S in water without enzymes and that it releases H2S faster in organic solvents than in water or when mixed in topsoil. Furthermore, we describe the long-term effect of dosing pea, radish, and lettuce plants with GYY-4137 for up to six weeks. The effect of GYY-4137 on plant growth for six weeks was either positive or negative depending on the loading of GYY-4137 and how it was applied to plants. The addition of GYY-4137 to lettuce plants via potting mix resulted in reduced growth and death of the plants. In contrast, application of GYY-4137 to the leaves of lettuce plants increased the harvest weight of the leaves by up to 86%. Our results demonstrate that GYY-4137 can have a positive, important effect on the growth of plants but that this effect is dependent on several factors.

Highlights

The worldwide population is expected to grow from its current level of 7.2B to 9.6B people by 2050.[1,2,3] To meet the needs of the world’s growing human population, it is projected that global food production must increase 70% by 2050.[4]
The hydrolysis of GYY-4137 was followed in DMSO-d6 using 31P NMR spectroscopy for 109 days
Hydrolysis reactions require the presence of water as a reagent, and this reaction used the residual water in DMSO-d6 to complete this reaction

Summary

Introduction

The worldwide population is expected to grow from its current level of 7.2B to 9.6B people by 2050.[1,2,3] To meet the needs of the world’s growing human population, it is projected that global food production must increase 70% by 2050.[4] Aside from sheer population numbers, there are additional factors that will increase market demand for food production. Trends indicate that as developing countries urbanize and their economies grow, their consumption of meat and dairy products will increase. Because the conversion of feed to livestock is inefficient (for instance, each pound of hamburger requires 52 pounds of feed grain over a cow’s lifetime), [5] growth in this sector creates an increasing demand for cereal crops. Biofuel production may drive cereal demands even higher. The amount of land dedicated to farming has remained at 1992 levels both in the United States and worldwide, which has led to a decrease in agricultural area per capita from 0.44 hectares per capita in 1960 to 0.17 hectares

Results

Discussion

Conclusion