Novel Investigation on Ammonium Thiosulphate (ATS) as an Inhibitor of Soil Urease and Nitrification

Abstract

Among the numerous products so far promoted as effective urease and/or nitrification inhibitors, it is possible to detect a renewed interest in environmentally friendly tools, such as ammonium thiosulphate (ATS, (NH4)2S2O3) which is currently used as fertilizer for N and S nutrition. Among contradictory results accounted in the current literature, there is reported that ammonium thiosulphate (ATS) exerts inhibitory activity at large but unlikely agronomic rates of 2500-5000 mg•kg −1 soil. We carried out a novel experiment aimed to: a) verify the inhibitory action of ATS, even when applied in soil at low rates (25 and 100 mg•kg −1 soil as S-ATS), towards urease activity and nitrification in urea treated and not treated soils; b) investigate on the influence of ATS on the soil microbial biomass as it is generally assumed that soil microorganisms are the main agents of urea hydrolysis. For these purposes we selected an arable sandy soil and a grassland sandy-loam soil which are treated with urea or/and ATS. Results obtained from this novel investigation showed that a) ATS significantly decreased urease activity in both soil types and that the exerted inhibitory effect was moderate and short-term; b) ATS retarded the hydrolysis of urea and lowered nitrate production in the urea treated soils; c) the available fraction of iron and manganese in the used soils might be involved in the mechanism of inhibition; d) ATS did not affect the size of soil microbial biomass pool; e) the efficiency of ATS as urease and nitrification inhibitor was more evident in the sandy soil. Because of its properties, ATS may be applicable on many crops without being harmful on the soil microbial pool.

Nitrous oxide emission from agricultural soils

“…(Bronson et al, 1992) 4-amino-1,2,4-6-triazole-HCl ATC Ishihada Industries (Malhi & Nyborg, 1988) 2,4-diamino-6-trichloromethyltriazine Cl-1580 American Cyanamid (Bremner & Yeomans, 1986) Dicyandiamide DCD Showa Denko y (Treweek et al, 2016) Thiourea TU Nitto Ryuso (Malhi & Nyborg, 1988) 1-mercapto-1,2,4-triazole MT Nippon No recent reference 2-amino-4-chloro-6-methylpyramidine AM Mitsui chemicals (Kumar et al, 2015) 2-sulfanilamidothiazole ST Mitsui Chemicals (Bremner & Yeomans, 1986) (Menéndez et al, 2012) 1-amide-2-thiourea ASU Nitto Chemical Ind. n (Bremner & Yeomans, 1986) Ammonium thiosulphate ATS Fertilizer (Margon et al, 2015) 3-methylpyrazole 3-MP /SKW Piesterwitz y (Barneze et al, 2015) 1H-1,2,4-triazole HPLC (Barneze et al, 2015) 5-ethylene oxide-3-trichloro- Karanjin (Datta & Adhya, 2014) Calcium carbide (Bronson et al, 1992) N (2,5 dichlorphenyl) succinic acid monoamide DCS (Skiba & Smith, 1993) Polyolefin coated urea POCU (Delgado & Mosier, 1996) 3,4 dimethylpyrazol succinic acid DMPSA Eurochem (Pacholski et al, 2016) Potassium thiosulfate KTS fertilizer (Cai, 2018) The effect of nitrification inhibitors is strongly influenced by soil and soil moisture contents. In some experiments nitrification inhibitors were completely ineffective (van der Weerden et al, 2016;Nauer et al, 2018).…”

Assessing the effect of heavy metals from the Novocherkassk power station emissions on the biological activity of soils in the adjacent areas

“…Urease, which represents the class of hydrolases, plays an important role in the cycle of nitrogen (Calvarro et al, 2014;Ge et al, 2010;Hu et al, 2014;Margon et al, 2015;Nie et al, 2015). Inverse correlations were observed between the content of loosely bound metals and the activity of urease in alluvial and meadow-alluvial soils.…”

Potentials of using dietary plant secondary metabolites to mitigate nitrous oxide emissions from excreta of cattle: Impacts, mechanisms and perspectives

“…1 also shows that inhibiting the activities of the enzymes which catalyze the processes of nitrification and denitrification could be another approach to decrease N 2 O emissions. Previous studies showed that thiosulfate could decrease NH 4 + concentrations derived from the degradation of urea by inhibiting soil urease activity ( Margon et al., 2015 ) and reduce the N 2 O emissions from the soil applied with urea ( Cai et al., 2018 ). Dicyandiamide, hippuric acid, and benzoic acid are also well-known nitrification inhibitors that could depress soil nitrification and subsequently attenuate the N 2 O emission of urine patches from ruminants ( Bertram et al., 2009 ; Minet et al., 2018 ).…”