Several grain legumes are staple food crops that are important sources of minerals for humans; unfortunately, our knowledge is incomplete with respect to the mechanisms of translocation of these minerals to the vegetative tissues and loading into seeds. Understanding the mechanism and partitioning of minerals in pea could help in developing cultivars with high mineral density. A mineral partiti...

Several quantitative trait locus analyses have suggested that grain yield and nitrogen use efficiency are well correlated with nitrate storage capacity and efficient remobilization. This study of the Arabidopsis thaliana nitrate transporter NRT1.7 provides new insights into nitrate remobilization. Immunoblots, quantitative RT-PCR, beta-glucuronidase reporter analysis, and immunolocalization ind...

Senescence is a coordinated process where a plant, or a part of it, engages in programmed cell death to salvage nutrients by remobilizing them to younger tissues or to developing seeds. As Fe and Zn deficiency are the two major nutritional disorders in humans, increased concentration of these nutrients through biofortification in cereal grains is a long-sought goal. Recent evidences point to a ...

Seed formation is an important step of plant development which depends on nutrient allocation. Uptake from soil is an obvious source of nutrients which mainly occurs during vegetative stage. Because seed filling and leaf senescence are synchronized, subsequent mobilization of nutrients from vegetative organs also play an essential role in nutrient use efficiency, providing source-sink relations...

Radial stem growth and the isotopic composition of growth rings are commonly used to quantify the effects of droughts on trees. However, often these parameters are quantified only at one stem height, e.g., 1.3 m, and it is not known how representative this is for the whole stem. This study investigated radial growth at four stem heights (1.3, 5.5, 9.8 and 14 m) of 21, and wood Δ(13)C and δ(18)O...

As the first organ in plants to sense water-deficit in the soil, roots have important roles for improving crop adaption to water limited environments. Stem water soluble carbohydrates (WSC) are a major carbon source for grain filling under drought conditions. The contributions of root WSC during grain filling under drought has not been revealed. Wheat parental lines of Westonia, Kauz and their ...

Terminal drought is a risk for wheat production in many parts of the world. Robust physiological traits for resilience would enhance the preselection of breeding lines in drought-prone areas. Three pot experiments were undertaken to characterize stem water-solublecarbohydrate (WSC), fructan exohydrolase expression, grain filling and leaf gas exchange in wheat (Triticum aestivum) varieties, Kauz...

This study investigated the interactive effects of different rates of deficit irrigation and timings of N application on wheat and barley yields since there was no report on this important subject. Field experiments in strip-plot designs using sprinkler line sources were conducted for two years at a semi-arid Mediterranean site. The experiments consisted of 4 and 7 irrigation levels with 3 and ...

In wheat, stem water soluble carbohydrates (WSC), composed mainly of fructans, are the major carbon sources for grain filling during periods of decreasing photosynthesis or under drought stress after anthesis. Here, in a field drought experiment, WSC levels and associated enzyme activities were followed in different stem segments (peduncle, penultimate internode, lower parts of stem, and sheath...