Natural Variations and Genetic Constraints on Plant Nutrition

About this Research Topic

Background

Mineral nutrients are required for the healthy growth and development of plants and are essential for human health. However, plants also take up and accumulate nonessential and toxic elements, leading to phytotoxicity and/or posing a risk to human health through the food chain.

The availability of mineral elements in soil varies widely and can be present in concentrations that lead to deficiency or in concentrations that cause an excess in plants. The concentration of mineral elements also fluctuates spatially and temporally. Correspondingly, plants have evolved tightly regulated systems for employing an adequate amount of minerals for growth and development while preventing the potential overaccumulation of minerals in the face of changing environments. Therefore, it is an urgent issue to identify the genetic regulators of minerals transport systems in plants, so these mechanisms can be exploited and contribute to both food security and safety.

Understating the genetic regulatory mechanisms for mineral element uptake, accumulation, and distribution in plants will makes it possible to develop an ideal future crop harboring higher usage efficiency of essential mineral elements for adapting to changeable environments. In addition, these mechanisms can be exploited to produce a crop containing the elevated levels of essential mineral elements, while reducing the concentration of toxic elements in the edible organs. Various kinds of membrane transporters, enzymes, and regulatory proteins have been identified and functionally characterized, but only in very limited plant species.

The increasingly released datasets of genome sequencing and re-sequencing, pan-genomics, and RNA-seq provide abundant data resources to study the natural variations of critical genes responsible for mineral transport and accumulation in plant species, as well as the evolutionary conserved factors among the plant kingdom. Comparative genomics makes it convenient to explore the different strategies of plant nutrient absorption, transformation, and utilization in a large scale among different species. It would be helpful to excavate the germplasms and candidate functional genes and provide new insights into understanding the mechanisms of natural variation and genetic constraints on plant nutrition.

In this Research Topic, we would like to emphasize the genetic conservation and variation of gene alleles responsible for the uptake, distribution, utilization, assimilation, detoxification, and accumulation of mineral elements including both essential and toxic metal(loid)s in plants. Article types including Original Research, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Methods, Perspectives, and Opinions are welcome in this collection.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Quantitative genetics of plant nutrition: association mapping studies covering genome-wide association studies (GWAS), population, and classical quantitative trait loci (QTL).
• Evolutionary analyses of the molecular mechanisms underlying the mineral usage efficiencies, accumulation, detoxification, and so on.
• Identification and functional studies of various gene haplotypes in plant nutrition.
• Ionmics and genetic diversity analyses of mineral accumulation in plants.
• Genetic improvement of plants with improved traits on nutrition through marker-assistant selection, biotechnology, and genome-editing.
• The genetic origin and evolution of hyperaccumulators.
• The genetic strategies plants utilize to adapt to changing minerals conditions around the rhizosphere.

Keywords: Plant nutrition, mineral elements, natural variations, quantitative genetics, and comparative genomics

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