article · Sustainability
Bulk selenium offers valuable biological properties but suffers from high toxicity and low bioavailability. Biosynthesising nano-selenium provides a sustainable alternative with lower toxicity for agricultural use. A bacterium capable of reducing sodium selenite into elemental nano-selenium was isolated and identified as Bacillus cereus TAH. The resulting biological nano-selenium particles were evaluated for their ability to protect wheat seeds during germination under salt-stressed conditions. Application of 100 milligrams per litre of biosynthesised nano-selenium significantly enhanced seed performance under salinity stress, raising germination percentage by 25 percent and the vigour index by nearly 40 percent. Furthermore, trials in a gnotobiotic sand system under high electrical conductivity demonstrated substantial gains in vegetative development, boosting shoot length, root length, fresh weight, and dry weight by approximately 19 to 25 percent compared to untreated plants. Nano-selenium produced using bacteria thereby supports wheat growth in saline conditions.
Soil salinity severely restricts crop productivity and poses a major challenge to food security in arid and degraded agricultural lands. Conventional bulk selenium is often too toxic and poorly absorbed to help crops manage stress safely. Utilizing bacteria to create nano-selenium offers a sustainable, biologically derived treatment that strengthens wheat germination and early seedling growth, providing a potential biological strategy for cultivating crops in salt-affected environments.
This approach could enable biological seed treatments and biostimulant formulations to assist wheat farmers cultivating saline or degraded soils. Agrochemical and seed enhancement manufacturers could explore microbial production of nano-selenium as an input. However, the findings represent early-stage, controlled laboratory and gnotobiotic sand testing. Extensive open-field trials, scalability studies for bacterial nanoparticle production, and safety assessments will be required before any commercial agricultural product can be developed.
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Selenium and its derivatives have been found capable of excellent biological responses. However, the element in its bulk form has low bioavailability and increased toxicity, meaning the production of effective forms with sustainable methods has become urgent. Several microorganisms, including fungi, bacteria and yeast, as well as higher plants, are capable of biosynthesizing nanoparticles such as nano-selenium (nano-Se), which has wide applications in medicine, agriculture and industry. Thus, the biosynthesis of nano-Se using some bacterial species was the main target of this study. The production of nano-Se and the monitoring of its impact on the wheat germination of seeds under salt stress (i.e., 50, 100, and 150 mM NaCl) was also evaluated in the current study. The ameliorative role of nano-Se doses (i.e., 50, 75, and 100 mg L−1) in the germination of wheat seeds under salt stress was also investigated. Based on sodium selenite tolerance and reducing selenite to elemental Se-NPs, the most effective isolate (TAH) was selected for identification using the 16S rRNA gene sequence, which belonged to Bacillus cereus TAH. The final germination percent, mean germination time, vigor index and germination rate index were improved by 25, 25, 39.4 and 11%, respectively, under 15 mM sodium chloride concentration when 100 mg L−1 nano-selenium was used. On the other hand, the results obtained from a gnotobiotic sand system reveal that with treatment with 100 mg L−1 nano-selenium under high Ec values of 14 ds m−1, the vegetative growth parameters of shoot length, root length, fresh weight and dry weight were improved by 22.8, 24.9, 19.2 and 20%, respectively, over untreated controls. The data obtained from this study reveal that the use of nano-selenium produced by Bacillus cereus offers improved wheat seed germination under a salt-affected environment.
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DOI: 10.3390/su14031784
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