Herbicide May Have Unintended Consequences

Purdue Univ. researchers have discovered a fine-tuning mechanism involved in plant root growth that has them questioning whether a popular herbicide may have unintended consequences, causing some plants to need more water or nutrients.

Angus Murphy, a professor of horticulture, and Wendy Peer, an assistant professor of horticulture, study the movement of auxin, a plant hormone essential for plant development. They showed that ABCB4, a protein responsible for moving auxin into cells, also removes the hormone when too much has accumulated.

"We knew that the protein took auxin up, but found that it switched to removing auxin when a threshold is reached," says Murphy, whose findings appeared in the early online version of The Plant Journal. "It starts transporting the hormones out."

That fine-tuning mechanism is integral to proper development of plant root hairs, which extend from the main plant root and are where most water and minerals enter.

Read full article in: The LaboratoryEquipment.com

What Makes Plants Grow

By Alexis Madrigal

To understand why fertilizer works, we need to get some basic plant biology out of the way. Plants need large amounts of three nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Combine those with water and sunlight and plants will grow.

In a natural ecosystem, nutrients are naturally cycled. Plants grow, using these substances, then they die. Microbes decompose them and new plants use the same nutrients to grow again. You know, the whole circle of life thing.

Agriculture gives us civilization exactly because it disrupts this balance. Humans use plants to mine nutrients out of the soil and then eat them. We can even measure the amount of nutrients that a crop can mine for us. For example, a hectare of maize in the US needs about 22 kilograms pounds of nitrogen per tonne of yield. We call this the plant’s mineral uptake. Problem is, the corn on the cob you’re eating is full of the nutrients that the next generation of plants would have used. We’ve taken nutrients out of the cycle, so we’ve got to replace them or the soil will be depleted.

Read more:
What Makes Plants Grow

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