Saturday, May 4, 2013

More food and greener farming with specialised transporters for plants

Seed Daily via SPX: To grow more food more sustainably we need to make plants better at recruiting nutrients and water from soil to seed, according to 12 leading plant scientists writing in Nature. Essential to this are proteins called membrane transporters. Transporters also effectively carry high-energy molecules to where they are needed, help plants resist pathogens and make plants more tolerant to adverse conditions. One challenge is to make crops do these things simultaneously.

"Just as our mobile phones will need more advanced technology to carry more information, plants will need better or new transporters to do the extra work we're going to require of them," said corresponding co-author Professor Dale Sanders, director of the John Innes Centre. "We want plants to load up with more of what they need from the soil, making the most of what it offers. Or where the soil harbours salt or toxins, we want the plant to offload them or exclude them from essential cells where they could do harm."

Transporters can carry important molecules from outside to inside cells or vice versa. Recent advances in understanding how plants control these processes will help scientists create new tools to hand over to breeders.

Of the present global population of seven billion people, almost one billion are undernourished and lack sufficient protein, fats and carbohydrates in their diets. At the same time, we are close to the sustainable limit of 15% of Earth's surface that can be exploited for food production. "We need to make the crops growing on existing agricultural land work harder," said Professor Sanders....

Grains in a Cairo market, shot by Awadewit, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

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