Use of Yucca () Extracts as Biostimulants to Promote Germination and Early Vigor and as Natural Fungicides.

Climate change is increasing drought and salinity in many cultivated areas, therefore threatening food production. There is a great demand for novel agricultural inputs able to maintain yield under the conditions imposed by the anthropogenic global warming. Biostimulants have been proposed as a useful tool to achieve this objective.

A fast method to evaluate in a combinatorial manner the synergistic effect of different biostimulants for promoting growth or tolerance against abiotic stress.

Background: According to the most popular definition, a biostimulant is any substance or microorganism applied to plants with the aim to enhance nutrition efficiency, abiotic stress tolerance and/or crop quality traits, regardless of its nutrient content. Therefore, a biostimulant can help crops to withstand abiotic stress, while maintaining or even increasing productivity. We have previously designed a sequential system, based on two different model organisms, the baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, to evaluate the potential of different natural extracts as biostimulants employing a blind-test strategy.