Lettuce plants treated with L-pyroglutamic acid increase yield under water deficit stress

Abstract

Water scarcity is one of the main challenges faced by modern agriculture, leading to a substantial drop in crop productivity and a threat to food security. Thus, novel agricultural approaches are necessary and urgent to face this problem. Some natural compounds such as amino acids have been shown to increase yield and mitigate the effects of drought stress. In this study, we demonstrate that the application of pyroglutamic acid (PG) is capable of increasing lettuce yield, under field conditions with 30% less than optimal irrigation. PG treatment showed a clearly protective effect in stressed plants, enhancing their fresh weight by 37% and yield by 31%, in comparison to untreated plants. PG appears to promote drought tolerance effects in deficit irrigated lettuce plants, with several advantages. It acts by enhancing photosynthesis rate and antioxidant defences, while maintaining osmotic and water balance, without toxicity to soil microorganisms. This illustrates the potential use of PG to combat productivity losses due to water scarcity.

Response of Downy Oak (Quercus pubescens Willd.) to Climate Change: Transcriptome Assembly, Differential Gene Analysis and Targeted Metabolomics

“…Throughout the seasons, drought induces an increasing accumulation of pyroglutamic acid ( Table 5 ). This result is in accordance with the finding that the application of pyroglutamic acid highly promotes water stress tolerance effects in deficit irrigated lettuce, probably as a precursor of proline biosynthesis [ 53 ]. However, a cyclization of free glutamine and glutamate to free pyroglutamic acid in electrospray ionization-based mass spectrometry is not excluded [ 54 ].…”

Pure Organic Active Compounds Against Abiotic Stress: A Biostimulant Overview

“…To address this problem, some authors use more moderate conditions, closer to real scenarios. Thus, a recent study on drought-stressed lettuce only reduced normal irrigation by 30%, with promising results ( Jiménez-Arias et al, 2019a ). Lettuce is an excellent model for this stress since it is sensitive to drought and the yield is based on vegetative growth.…”

Simultaneous and sequential based co-fermentations of Trichoderma asperellum GDFS1009 and Bacillus amyloliquefaciens 1841: a strategy to enhance the gene expression and metabolites to improve the bio-control and plant growth promoting activity

“…Pyroglutamic acid, a non-protein amino-acid was induced in TB2. The induced production of glutamic acid and glutamine in the TB2 might be responsible for the synthesis of pyroglutamic acid [31].…”