2023-10-03 20:45:44
They discover how plants regulate their growth based on nitrate in the soil. This finding could dramatically reduce the need for fertilizers.
The exaggerated growth of the plants can put the yield of the crops at risk, because if they are too tall they can break or overturn due to the action of the wind and this means, among other things, that the combines cannot reach the grains.
In a new study, published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), CONICET researchers at the Fundación Instituto Leloir (FIL) and the Institute for Physiological and Ecological Research Linked to Agriculture (IFEVA) of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), in Argentina, all these institutions revealed the molecular mechanism that participates in the control of stem growth in the face of changes in the abundance of nitrate, a source of an essential nutrient in agricultural soils, a discovery opens the doors to development of more efficient crops.
“During the ‘green revolution’, technologies were adopted that increased the production of agricultural crops very markedly. In crops such as wheat or rice, for example, dwarfism genes were incorporated and thus dwarf specimens were obtained that did not tip over so easily. A side effect of this development is that the plant’s efficiency in using soil nitrogen is reduced. So, to have the same effect you have to fertilize more, something that has higher ecological and economic costs,” explained to the CyTA-Leloir Agency the agronomist and doctor in plant biological sciences Jorge Casal, head of the Molecular Physiology Laboratory of Plants of the FIL and one of the authors of the work.
An agricultural field. (Photo: Arizona Water Science Center / USGS)
Using the hypocotyl (stem during early development) of the plant Arabidospis thaliana as a model, Casal and his colleague Matías Ezequiel Pereyra, first author of the study, determined together with other collaborators how the stem reacts to the presence of nitrate. “We compared what happened at low and high concentrations and we saw no differences in growth. However, when we increased the concentration of available nitrate, the growth of the hypocotyl was promoted,” said Pereyra, also a researcher at FIL and IFEVA.
“A home may have an external thermal switch that controls all electricity; Later, the electrical circuit can be divided and have keys for each sector and later still, within a branch of the circuit, there can be thermals for specific appliances, which can be cut to fix that equipment without affecting the electricity of the rest of the home. The dwarfism genes that have been used until now are like more general keys,” the specialist noted. And he highlighted: “We have identified other genes, called SAUR, that more specifically control growth.”
The researchers also determined that the PIF4 protein plays a central role in the expression of these genes in the face of increased nitrate.
Now, with this new information in hand, scientists hope to achieve dwarf plants, but that do not have low nitrogen utilization efficiency and thus be able to reduce the use of fertilizers. “We aspire to maintain the benefit, without the negative side effect,” Casal summarized. (Source: CyTA-Leloir Agency)
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