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Molecular Mechanism of Plant Mineral Nutrient Transport under Drought Stress

A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Plant Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 March 2024) | Viewed by 263

Special Issue Editor

Department of Agricultural and Forest Sciences (DAFNE), University of Tuscia, Via S. C. de Lellis, 01100 Viterbo, Italy
Interests: plant physiological response to mineral deficiencies (mainly S and Fe); problems related to soil contamination with cadmium; the role of membrane activities in the plant's response to stress and variations in nutrient availability
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Drought is viewed as the most common environmental stress, negatively impacting the normal physiology and growth of plants, and it will be a major challenge for agriculture due to global climate change.

Drought results in limited plant growth and development, due to reduced photosynthetic efficiency and then C assimilation, but also due to increased generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS).

However, drought can strongly affect plant nutrient relations. It has been demonstrated that drought can decrease the concentration of most nutrients in plant tissues (including in seeds), both by altering the rate of ecosystem nutrient cycles, thus causing the reduction of nutrient supply through mineralization, and by reducing nutrient diffusion and mass flow in the soil. Moreover, drought stress results in reduced nutrient uptake from the soil. The mechanisms that plants have evolved for nutrient uptake, translocation and assimilation may not optimally function under drought conditions.

On the other hand, nutrients are also helpful to alleviate drought stress. Among adaptive mechanisms developed by plants to cope with drought stress condition, the improvement of the mineral-nutrient status seems to play a critical role. Under drought, plants increase the allocation of resources to roots and the release of root exudates, to favour the uptake of nutrients.

Given the above implications and considering that most vegetable and seed crops are cultivated in semiarid areas and in regions suffering from temporary drought, it is of primary importance to understand how water stress affects the nutrient uptake and assimilation capability of plants, in order to optimize the crop efficiency and sustainability of soil nutrients, to improve the competitiveness and sustainability of agriculture whilst minimizing environmental impacts.

Dr. Stefania Astolfi
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • assimilation
  • climate change
  • drought
  • nutrients
  • transport
  • transporters
  • uptake

Published Papers

There is no accepted submissions to this special issue at this moment.
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