Objective
Summary
Most plants,especially under agricultural conditions use both ammonium and nitrate as the main nitrogen sources absorbed from the soil. The importance of soil NH4+ absorption is particularly relevant for plant growth under conditions of poor nitrification where NH4+ is the prevalent nitrogen source. Furthermore, in nitrogen fixing root nodules fixed nitrogen is transmiKed from the bacteria to the legume plant cells in the form of NH4+. Since they control whether the ion is taken up into the plant, NH4+ transport proteins play a strategic role in nitrogen efficiency. Despite this, the first genes encoding NH4+ transporters were only recently isolated, from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, respectively. These transporters were found to constitute a new class of transport protein and to be highly conserved from bacteria to plants and animals. There is evidence that multiple NH4+ transporters exist in both S. cerevisiae and A. thaliana and recent data on expression of plant NH4+ transporters in root hairs is strongly indicative of their pivotal role in nitrogen nutrition. Interestingly, ammonium transporters also function as ammonium sensors at least in yeast. Nitrogen sensing is certainly of major importance for the development of root architecture. A manipulation of ammonium uptake and sensing should thus allow to increase nitrogen efficiency of crop plants at two levels: optimized uptake through more efficient transport at the plasma membrane and through improved root structure and surface.
The aim of this proposal is to carry out an integrated molecular and physiological analysis of NH4+ transport proteins in a variety of organisms (i) in nitrogen-fixing bacteria involved in transfer of nitrogen to the plant Rhizobium and in two model plants i.e. Arabidopsis and the legume Lotus. Yeast mutants, which served as a tool to identify the transporter genes will be used as tools to characterize plant transporters and to establish their role in ammonium sensing. The setting up of this multiple species-based approach was motivated by the apparent evolutionary conservation of NH4+ transporters, by the importance of the interaction of plants with microorganisms (symbiosis, competition) in NH4+ assimilation, and by the successful utilization of model organisms like yeast to isolate and characterize plant transporters.
Practically, the project aims to (i) isolate all the genes encoding different NH4+ transporters present in the abovementioned organisms, including possible efflux systems (ii) determine the biochemical and electrophysiological properties of each isolated transporter (iii) determine the tissue- and cell-specific distribution of plant NH4+ transporters (v) investigate the influence of environmental conditions on expression of NH4+ transporter genes (vi) to isolate strains lacking or overexpressing NH4+ transporters and to anal their phenotype with respect to the ability to acquire and assimilate NH4+. The ultimate goals will be to understand the molecular mechanism of this novel class of ion transporters, to evaluate the role of NH4+ transport proteins in nitrogen efficiency of both legume and non-legume model plants and to assess the feasibility to modify through genetic engineering plant and/or symbiotic bacteria characters in order to improve plant nitrogen efficiency. The gained knowledge will be transferred in a parallel approach into important crop species such as rape.
The planned work will also establish a model for interaction between EU labs and industrial partners having complementary expertise and a common biological interest analysed through different model organisms. Such a combination of scientific backgrounds, achievable only in a pan-European context, promises to lay new foundations for efficient and effective studies in fundamental aspects of biology of plants and interacting microorganisms which can be directly applied to agricultural and environmental improvement.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology bacteriology
- medical and health sciences medical biotechnology genetic engineering
- natural sciences biological sciences biochemistry biomolecules proteins
- natural sciences biological sciences biological behavioural sciences ethology biological interactions
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture grains and oilseeds legumes
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Coordinator
72076 Tübingen
Germany
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