Optimizing nitrogen levels combined with gibberellic acid for enhanced yield, photosynthetic attributes, enzyme activities, and artemisinin content of Artemisia annua

Abstract

BoldItalic L. is an aromatic-antibacterial herb that destroys malarial parasites, lowers fever, and checks bleeding, and from which the secondary compound of interest is artemisinin. It has become increasingly popular as an effective and safe alternative therapy against malaria, and its derivatives are effective against multidrug resistant BoldItalic strains. Nitrogen is required by the plants in the largest quantity and is most limiting where biomass production is desired. On the other hand, gibberellic acid plays an important role in flowering, growth, and development and also in other physiological and biochemical processes. The feasibility of foliar GA₃ (75 mg·L^-1) alone or with varying levels of soil applied nitrogen (40, 80, and 120 mg·kg^-1 soil) was tested on BoldItalic in the present study. The application of GA₃ proved effective in alleviating the growth, photosynthesis, and enzyme activities of BoldItalic. However, N levels combined with GA₃ showed better responses, and further improvement in these parameters was observed. Furthermore, the most important task we were interested in was to increase the artemisinin content and its yield on a per plant basis. The N combination (80 mg·kg^-1 soil) together with GA₃ augmented the content (21.8% more) and yield (55.8% more); this is true for both the treated plants, which were more than the control.

Keywords

Artemisia annua L. / artemisinin / gibberellic acid / nitrogen / photosynthesis

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mr. M. Ram (SRF-CSIR) for his kind help in HPLC analysis of artemisinin. The financial assistance to the first author in the form of RA fellowship by Council of Science and Technology, UP, Lucknow (CST/D-3539) is gratefully acknowledged.

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