Spotlight on Hicure
Amino acids as an antidote to stress
Less-than-ideal conditions that can occur on the nursery, or on the way to customers, put plants under environmental stress, writes Glenn Kirby - Technical Manager for Syngenta in the UK & Ireland. Here he explains the negative impacts on plants and when to use the new biostiumulant, Hicure, to help improve resilience.
While plants can respond to stressful conditions to protect themselves, at least in the short term, those responses take energy and can shut down some important parts of their metabolism, inevitably taking their toll on growth and development. Even when the stress is eliminated, the crop may never catch up - so quality suffers, with consequences for plant performance in the garden or landscape.
Stress affects plant proteins
An element of the stress response that is increasingly well understood is how it affects plant proteins.
Proteins form the structural elements of cells and tissues but they’re also the enzymes that control all of the thousands of different biochemical processes in the plant – such as photosynthesis, nutrient transport and regulation of flowering.
Large, complex molecules - each with a specific job to do - proteins are formed from long, folded, chains of much simpler molecules called amino acids. There are just 20 different naturally occurring amino acids used by plants. A typical protein molecule contains anything from 50 to over 2,000 amino acids. It is the order in which the amino acids are arranged that creates the characteristics of the millions of different proteins found in nature.
Making amino acids
Under ideal growing conditions, plants make their own amino acids
During periods of stress photosynthesis is reduced, so plants save energy by scaling back amino acid production. They may even break down some types of protein to reuse the amino acids elsewhere – some individual amino acid molecules, for example, help to protect from stress. One called proline is known to accumulate in the cells of plants suffering from dehydration, where it helps to retain water in the cells and protects membranes and some key enzymes from damage.
Hicure improves stress resilience
Our new biostimulant Hicure – available from ICL and its distributors - helps improve stress resilience by providing a readily available source of amino acids, both as individual molecules and in peptide chains.
Hicure helps to reduce the amount of energy the plant channels into its protein metabolismwhile in periods of stress, the plant conserves energy and avoids the waste of breaking down existing proteins to ‘recycle’ their amino acids.
You don’t need any specialist equipment to apply Hicure and it’s compatible with most crop protection and fertiliser products.
Benefits
Trials across Europe and in the USA, over a range of protected ornamentals, cut flowers and hardy nursery stock, show treatment improves root mass, vigour and ‘shelf-life’.
Weekly applications on lavender on the nursery, for example, maintained quality for longer during simulated transport and retail marketing and led to better flowering after planting out.
When to use
Hicure is best used as a regular spray or drench. Optimum results are achieved when applied before any stressful conditions or ahead of crucial crop development phases such as flowering; to aid establishment when potting on; when environmental stress, such as hot weather, is expected; or before dispatch to guard against conditions in transport or at the point of sale. Hicure can also be considered a useful ‘insurance’ to make crops more resilient against, for example, a failure in the irrigation system over a weekend.