Improving coordination of plant growth and nitrogen metabolism for sustainable agriculture
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aBIOTECH
REVIEW
Improving coordination of plant growth and nitrogen metabolism for sustainable agriculture Xiang Han1 , Kun Wu1 , Xiangdong Fu1,2 , Qian Liu1& 1
2
The State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Innovation Academy for Seed Design, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China College of Life Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Received: 17 April 2020 / Accepted: 20 July 2020
Abstract
The agricultural green revolution of the 1960s boosted cereal crop yield was in part due to cultivation of semi-dwarf green revolution varieties. The semi-dwarf plants resist lodging and require high nitrogen (N) fertilizer inputs to maximize yield. To produce higher grain yield, inorganic fertilizer has been overused by Chinese farmers in intensive crop production. With the ongoing increase in the food demand of global population and the environmental pollution, improving crop productivity with reduced N supply is a pressing challenge. Despite a great deal of research efforts, to date only a few genes that improve N use efficiency (NUE) have been identified. The molecular mechanisms underlying the coordination of plant growth, carbon (C) and N assimilation is still not fully understood, thus preventing significant improvement. Recent advances have shed light on how explore NUE within an overall plant biology system that considered the co-regulation of plant growth, C and N metabolisms as a whole, rather than focusing specifically on N uptake and assimilation. There are several potential approaches to improve NUE discussed in this review. Increasing knowledge of how plants sense and respond to changes in N availability, as well as identifying new targets for breeding strategies to simultaneously improve NUE and grain yield, could usher in a new green revolution.
Keywords Green revolution, Yield, Nitrogen use efficiency, Growth-metabolism coordination, Breeding strategy
INTRODUCTION N nutrients are essential for sustaining plant growth and development, the availability of N in the soil is a major limiting factor for crop yield. In the 1960s, the green revolution enhanced cereal crop yield, fed a growing human population, and was in part due to widespread adoption of semi-dwarf varieties (Khush 1999). The beneficial semi-dwarfism is conferred by the mutant alleles at wheat Reduced height-1 (Rht-1) and rice semi-dwarf1 (sd1) loci, respectively (Peng et al. 1999; Sasaki et al. 2002). Under high N conditions, green revolution varieties (GRVs) exhibit a reduced risk & Correspondence: [email protected] (Q. Liu)
of grain yield loss due to plant flattening by wind and rain (the yield-reducing phenomenon known as ‘lodging’). Both sd1 and Rht-1 alleles are still widely used now to produce new elite varieties of rice and wheat. Normally, the phytohormone gibberellin (GA) promotes plant growth by destructing the growth-repressing DELLA proteins (Sasaki et al. 2003; Fu et al. 2004). The wheat mutant Rht-1 protein likely
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