Nutritional stress in plants: understanding sensing and resilience

Abstract

Since the emergence of the Mineral Nutrition theory during the XIXcentury (van der Ploeg et al., 1999; Feller et al., 2003), the relevance ofmineral plant elements in the life of plants has become well documented.Meanwhile, a progressive number of studies helped to establish thatmost plants are able to acquire all the elements necessary for growth anddevelopment from inorganic sources. Because of the improvement ofanalytical techniques, a rising corpus of evidence has shown that plantsusually incorporate within their tissues many of the elements present inthe environments they inhabit. Several works indicate that some of theseelements could positively affect plant performance, thus suggesting thatduring evolution plants have used mineral resources encountered intheir habitats helping to ensure their survival and reproductive success.These observations pose important questions on how plants acquire andutilize those elements, which vary greatly in their availability in the soil.One key question refers to the way by which plants perceive fluctuationsin elements availability and respond accordingly, and also how theyintegrate the emerging signals with those coming from the fluctuationsof other biotic and abiotic components to yield a unified response, thusimpacting the efficiency by which functional plant elements are acquiredand utilized. A clear understanding of these issues seems to becritical to develop strategies to ensure the production of grains andpastures for a growing population while minimizing the negative impactof agronomic practices on the environment. In this special issue onNutritional Stress in Plants, the contributions made by authors frommany different countries address some specific topics related to thosequestions.