Journal
PLANT AND SOIL
Volume 374, Issue 1-2, Pages 1005-1021Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11104-013-1907-6
Keywords
microRNA; Nutrient stress response; Post-transcriptional regulation; Nitrogen deficiency; Phosphate starvation; Sulfate limitation; Copper depletion; Iron deprivation; Heavy metal stress
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation of China [31201679, U1130304]
- Program of New Century Excellent Talent in Universities [NCET-11-0672]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Plants must acquire at least 14 mineral nutrients from the soil to complete their life cycles. Insufficient availability or extreme high levels of the nutrients significantly affect plant growth and development. Plants have evolved a series of mechanisms to adapt to unsuitable growth conditions where nutrient levels are too low or too high. microRNAs (miRNAs), a class of small RNAs, are known to mediate post-transcriptional regulation by transcript cleavage or translational inhibition. Besides regulating plant growth and development, miRNAs are well documented to regulate plant adaptation to adverse environmental conditions including nutrient stresses. In this review, we focus on recent progress in our understanding of how miRNAs are involved in plant response to stresses resulting from deficiency in nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, copper and iron, as well as toxicities from heavy metal ions. Accumulated evidence indicates that miRNAs play critical roles in sensing the abundance of nutrients, controlling nutrient uptake and phloem-mediated long-distance transport, and nutrient homeostasis. miRNAs act as systemic signals to coordinate these physiological activities helping plants respond to and survive nutrient stresses and toxicities. Knowledge about how miRNAs are involved in plant responses to nutrient stresses promise to provide novel strategies to develop crops with improved nutrient use efficiency which could be grown in soils with either excessive or insufficient availability of nutrients.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available