Plant Adaptations to Phosphate Deficiency

Download or read book Plant Adaptations to Phosphate Deficiency written by Alex Joseph Valentine and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phosphate is an essential mineral to all plants, and its availability in soils is an increasing challenge for agriculture. Phosphate is abundant in soils but its biological availability is often low due to the complexes that it forms with soil minerals and compounds. The biological availability of Phosphate is further reduced in acidic soils, which represent approximately 40% of earth’s arable agricultural lands. Agricultural systems compensate Phosphate deficiency with fertilizers coming from the mining of rock phosphate, which is estimated to exhaust within the next 50 years. For these reasons, Phosphate limitations in natural and agricultural ecosystems is going to become a global problem, and we urgently need to better understand how plants respond to Phosphate deficiency.