Richard Ferrieri never thought that a simple bottle of liquid smoke would change the direction of his team's research. Initially, Ferrieri and a team of researchers at the University of Missouri focused on studying how soil soaked in intense wildfire smoke affects plant growth. But after they started their research, they made an amazing discovery, and they believe it could one day be used to improve the health of food crops.
Richard Ferrieri, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Missouri (MURR), said that when scientists from his research team added liquid smoke to the soil where a sunflower plant grows, they found that it could enhance its natural defenses and increase its ability to resist pests and diseases. according to Phys.org.
Liquid smoke resulting from the condensation of smoke from burning wood has been used to simulate, in a laboratory setting, the smoky conditions that a forest fire can create.
"Plants can't escape when they're trying to defend themselves against an active threat," said Ferrieri, who is also a member of the University of Missouri's Interdisciplinary Plant Science Group. “Therefore, a plant needs a lot of energy to allocate the precious resources that it normally devotes to its growth in order to protect itself. As with the human body, the key to plant health lies in how well their vascular system can function under stress.”
In this study, the scientists used a carbon-11 radioisotope created by a cyclotron at the University of Missouri to see how smoke affects the vascular system in sunflowers, or the system that transports carbon, water, and trace elements throughout the plant. Ferrieri said they found that sunflowers grown in liquid smoke-treated soil have larger, thicker, greener leaves and are less susceptible to pests and disease.
In the future, Ferrieri wants to expand this research by testing other crops, such as soybeans. Soy may be a natural extension of their research because it has a similar type of vascular system to sunflower and is also susceptible to various diseases.
Ferrieri hopes his lab's work will help find a possible solution to global food insecurity by providing a natural alternative to the use of pesticides to help farmers build crop resistance to various diseases.
Treatment with liquid smoke and some of the chemicals that dominate the smoke reduces the sectoriality of the phloem in sunflowers, improving growth.