About this Research Topic
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.
This Research Topic addresses plant root adaptations to Phosphate deficiency. We aim at building a collection of articles tackling this question through multiple approaches, and at multiple levels (molecular, cellular, physiological, morphological). We particularly welcome manuscripts dealing with the following topics:
- alterations in root anatomy and morphology
- role symbiotic associations
- biochemical alterations of metabolites, proteins, and genes
- role of phosphate transporters
- organic phosphate recycling processes
We welcome the following article types: original research papers, reviews, and short perspectives.
Keywords: phosphate deficiency, recycling of organic P, metabolic changes, gene regulation, protein regulation, symbiotic microbial associations, root modifications, cluster roots
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.