article · Current Plant Biology
Biostimulants are naturally derived substances or micro-organisms that stimulate plant growth, enhance nutrition, and build stress tolerance without relying on added nutrients. Sourced from materials such as algae, plant extracts, humic substances, and protein hydrolysates, they are increasingly replacing environmentally harmful chemical fertilisers. Evidence shows that biostimulants improve the chemical composition of food crops across normal conditions and under abiotic stress. These chemical improvements bolster plant resilience and enhance nutritional value, supporting food security, human health, and climate adaptation. However, because biostimulant formulations often feature complex and variable compositions, identifying their exact biological modes of action remains difficult. This uncertainty creates ongoing challenges for regulatory approval and consistent agricultural deployment.
Rising food demand and climate stress require alternatives to harmful chemical fertilisers. Biostimulants offer an environmentally friendly approach to improving crop nutrition and strengthening plant tolerance to environmental stress. Understanding their impacts on plant chemistry is essential for securing food quality, supporting human health, and establishing sound regulations for sustainable agriculture.
Biostimulants are positioned as alternatives to chemical fertilisers for agricultural producers seeking improved crop yield, nutritional quality, and stress resilience. However, commercialisation and regulatory compliance are constrained by formulation variability and unclear mechanisms of action. While the products are already applied and tested across diverse crops, further standardisation and economic clarity are needed before standardised, predictable market solutions can be widely deployed and regulated.
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Biostimulants are substances/micro-organisms that have the ability to stimulate plant growth, nutrition and stress tolerance independently of their nutritional content. They are increasingly replacing the use of chemical fertilizers, which have harmful consequences for the environment. Biostimulants are derived from a variety of sources, including micro-organisms, plant extracts, algae, hydrolysates of animal or plant proteins, and humic substances. They have been tested on a variety of crops under normal and abiotic stress conditions and have succeed each time in proving their effectiveness in improving the chemical composition of plants. This improvement has a positive impact on plants' nutritional properties and resistance to stress conditions. These effects not only have positive impact on human health, but also on climate change challenges, and increasing demand for food. However, the difficulty in interpreting the results obtained from the use of biostimulants is due to their variable composition, which is not always known, making it difficult to determine their modes of action and hence their regulation. The purpose of this review is to highlight the positive effect of biostimulants on the chemical composition of food crops under normal or abiotic stress conditions. It presents an overview of chemical variability in plants and gathers studies that help clarify the effect of biostimulants. Additional studies on economic aspects, research gaps, and future prospects in the field of biostimulants are also discussed. • Biostimulants improve chemical composition of food crops under normal conditions. • Abiotic stress causes considerable change in chemical composition of plants. • Biostimulants mitigate abiotic stress effect on chemical composition of crops. • Effect of biostimulant on crops chemical composition is hard to interpret. • Effect of biostimulant on crops chemical composition depends on several factors.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.cpb.2024.100410
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