Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news!

Subscribe I am already a subscriber

You are using software which is blocking our advertisements (adblocker).

As we provide the news for free, we are relying on revenues from our banners. So please disable your adblocker and reload the page to continue using this site.
Thanks!

Click here for a guide on disabling your adblocker.

Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news!

Subscribe I am already a subscriber

Engineering plant–microbe communication for plant nutrient use efficiency

Plant nutrient use efficiency (NUE) has become a major concern in recent years as farmers and scientists strive to make agriculture more sustainable. To this end, the manipulation of plant-microbe interactions holds great potential. In this short review, Griffin et al. highlight recent findings, focusing on two approaches aimed at increasing NUE by acting on the rhizosphere environment: the engineering of plant exudates from roots to favor the growth of beneficial microbes, and the engineering of microbial communities (bioinoculants) to increase nutrient availability. Along with proof-of-concept studies to increase NUE, the authors discuss the importance of biocontainment strategies for the deployment of such technologies in the field. There is indeed a growing need to translate these kind of fundamental discoveries from a laboratory setting to the field, a process that is both technically and legally challenging. Future efforts based on recent advances in computational and synthetic biology techniques will hopefully pave the way for better NUE in a broad range of crops.

Source: plantae.org

Publication date: