Growing healthy crops is hardly as straightforward as planting seeds. Beneath the surface, there's a host of issues that threaten each harvest, from microscopic pests to the presence of excess salt, known as soil salinization.
Fortunately, a new ultra-powerful imaging technique has led scientists to understand better how plants handle this salinization — and they believe that this knowledge could be adapted to fight food insecurity in the future, ScienceDaily reports.
When there is too much salt surrounding a plant's roots, it slowly acts as a poison, stunting their growth and blocking their access to water.
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The cost 💰 Nearly 25 million acres of agricultural land are destroyed by soil salinization every year already. But worse, an increasingly hotter, wetter climate because of human-caused pollution is exacerbating the issue, according to research published in the journal Nature. It's one of the many ways that our changing climate is throwing the future of food security into doubt.
That's why it's so important to understand how plants handle this salinization at a microscopic level in order to plan for engineering crops and growing conditions that can survive future increased levels of soil salinization. And crucially, this research helped scientists identify a specific transporter gene that is responsible for moving — or storing — the sodium inside the crops.
And even further, by using an incredibly strong cryogenic microprobe called the CryoNanoSIMS, they were able to see at what point plants become overwhelmed, no longer able to remove sodium. They also identified precisely where the plants instead begin storing excess sodium inside their cells.
Niko Geldner, the paper's co-corresponding author, explained, according to ScienceDaily: "Plants are fundamentally dependent on extracting mineral nutrients from the soil, but we were never able to observe their transport and accumulation at sufficient resolution. The CryoNanoSIMS technology finally achieves this and promises to transform our understanding of plant nutrition, beyond the problem of salt."
Other teams are working on similar projects, such as bioengineering crops to become more drought-resistant and producing crucial vitamins and minerals from microbes.
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