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Phosphorus (P) is an essential mineral nutrient for plants which is generally supplied to crops as phosphate fertiliser. Since conventional chemical assays of both the soil P available to crops and plant P status are often unreliable, large amounts of P fertilisers are routinely applied to ensure crop yield and quality. This can be costly and may cause unnecessary pollution.
Leaves from a sentinel plant responding to P starvation. +P (left) -P (right)
An alternative approach to monitor plant P status is to use technologies that exploit the changes in plant gene expression that occur in response to P deficiency. Using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana we have identified genes whose expression is altered in response to P deficiency. Transcripts (mRNA sequences) from these genes are being used to develop molecular array technologies to monitor the physiological P status of crops. We are also generating sentinel plants based on the regulatory (promoter) elements from phosphate-sensitive genes. Leaves from a sentinel plant, in which the promoter to the gene SQD1 was used to drive the expression of a marker enzyme (beta-glucuronidase or GUS), show enzyme activity only in response to P starvation.
Funding: BBSRC; Defra and HRI Gordon Browning Studentship
Collaborators: The University of Nottingham
This article first appeared in the HRI Annual Report (2002-2003)
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