NEBRASKA: Researchers study corn root growth under nitrogen-poor conditions
University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers are studying how corn roots adapt to insufficient nitrogen, with an eye toward making genetic tweaks that might increase, or at least maintain, plant growth and yields without excessive application of fertilizer.
The growth and development of corn largely depends on its nutrient uptake through the roots, so studying their growth, response and associated metabolic reprogramming to stress conditions is becoming an important research focus, said Rajib Saha.
The research is funded by a NSF CAREER grant; an NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research grant that supports the Nebraska EPSCoR Center for Root and Rhizobiome Innovation, awarded to Saha; and the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, a DOE Research Center supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the DOE Office of Science in which one of the collaborators, Penn State’s Costas Maranas, is involved.
“One of the critical aspects of growing any agricultural product is how much of the required micronutrients it can get from the soil,” said Rajib Saha. “The idea is to understand what happens when any plant needs to grow with nitrogen deficiency or stress. What kind of changes does the plant go through? If we can understand that better, can we now do some tweaking so that plants can survive or even thrive with taking lesser amounts of nitrogen?”
Saha’s team created a genome-scale metabolic model for the corn root to study its nitrogen-use efficiency under nitrogen stress conditions.