ROLE OF NITROGEN SENSING AND ITS INTEGRATIVE SIGNALING PATHWAYS IN SHAPING ROOT SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Highlight

● The Green Revolution broadened the trade-off between yield and nitrogen-use efficiency.

● Root developmental and metabolic adaptations to nitrogen availability.

● Mechanisms of nitrogen uptake and assimilation have been extensively studied.

● Modulating plant growth-metabolic coordination improves nitrogen-use efficiency in crops.

Abstract

The Green Revolution of the 1960s boosted crop yields in part through widespread production of semidwarf plant cultivars and extensive use of mineral fertilizers. The beneficial semidwarfism of cereal Green Revolution cultivars is due to the accumulation of plant growth-repressing DELLA proteins, which increases lodging resistance but requires a high-nitrogen fertilizer to obtain high yield. Given that environmentally degrading fertilizer use underpins current worldwide crop production, future agricultural sustainability needs a sustainable Green Revolution through reducing N fertilizer use while boosting grain yield above what is currently achievable. Despite a great deal of research efforts, only a few genes have been demonstrated to improve N-use efficiency in crops. The molecular mechanisms underlying the coordination between plant growth and N metabolism is still not fully understood, thus preventing significant improvement. Recent advances of how plants sense, capture and respond to varying N supply in model plants have shed light on how to improve sustainable productivity in agriculture. This review focuses on the current understanding of root developmental and metabolic adaptations to N availability, and discuss the potential approaches to improve N-use efficiency in high-yielding cereal crops.

Keywords

Nitrogen / root system architecture / phytohormone / crosstalk / nitrogen-use efficiency / breeding strategy

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32020103004, 32170251), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA24020309), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2019100), and Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (2018B020202012). We thank all the colleagues who contributed to the work.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Hui Liu, Qian Liu, Xiuhua Gao, and Xiangdong Fu declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any study with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

版权

2022 The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)