The largest international biostimulants event, the 2024 Biostimulants World Congress, opened today in Miami. The BSWC is the only conference connecting industry with unseen scientific discoveries.

BSWC offers a broad spectrum of keynote speeches, expert panels, scientific presentations, company showcases, awards ceremonies, poster tours, a gala reception and plenty of networking breaks over the course of the event.

Patrick Brown, BSWC scientific committee chair, and Distinguished Professor & Vice Chairman for the Department of Plant Sciences at University of California, Davis, opened the congress. He said that in many ways, biostimulants are still not mainstream.

But, whether you’re talking microbial or non microbial biostimulants, “the industry continues to grow at a remarkable rate. It is also promising that as the industry grows, so too does the scientific productivity,” said Brown.

He noted that there were about 1,600 biostimulant-related publications that used the word ‘biostimulant’ in the title or in keywords in 2023. “While that’s great, it also points out an issue.

“You can compare the amount of references on biostimulants with the amount of references on plant hormones (18,000), secondary metabolites (24,000), and plant breeding for stress (15,000),” said Brown. “So, we’re not yet there in terms of full scientific adoption and recognition of the term ‘biostimulants’. While research has very clearly increased over these ensuing 12 years, it hasn’t gained widespread scientific acceptance.”

Brown noted that all of the current regulatory frameworks that describe what is a biostimulant mention the word nutrition. “You can interpret nutrition as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc., or you could interpret nutrition as the whole ability of the organism to carry out its physiological function. The provision and the management of these responses to stress is an expression of the health and nutrition of the plant. So, this is another ambiguity between regulatory wording and biostimulant reality,” said Brown.

It has been proven that plant biostimulants ensure against abiotic stress. But according to Brown, there’s increasing evidence that they may also increase productivity in absence of stress. “We see a lot of papers in which the application of the biostimulant in the absence of an apparent stress, also results in plant growth. This again, in the regulatory framework to describe plant biostimulants, is a little bit of a contradiction. It could be explained, of course, that what we thought was stress free was not in fact stress free, and that subtle micro stresses are the difference between good performance and excellent performance,” he said.

This thinking about pathways and how biostimulants interact with specific metabolic pathways is important. Also, Brown said there are 166 billion bioactive organic small molecules in the databases. In addition, there are all the metabolites of the microbial world. “In terms of what do we know about what could be a biostimulant, we have just scratched the surface.

“You can look even deeper into different plant species, but whole diversity of new molecules, these are known bioactive compounds, so 65,000 amino acids and peptides with bioactivity, for 99,000 total known,” said Brown. “So, we’ve got a wide wide world of possibilities still out there.”

A deeper dive into biostimulants will be published in December in an e-book. Bookmark this page for the link, coming soon.