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Roger A. Leigh, Plant nutritional genomics Broadley MR, White PJ. eds. 2005. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. £115 (hardback). 321 pp., Annals of Botany, Volume 98, Issue 3, September 2006, Page 691, https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcl151
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Plant nutrition is ultimately an applied subject that seeks to understand the processes and mechanisms that underpin the uptake, assimilation and internal redistribution of nutrients by plants and then to use this information to improve the yield or quality of harvested plant parts, be they grains, storage roots or leafy vegetables. The subject now also encompasses the understanding of the responses of plants to nutrient toxicities (e.g. salinity) as well as new topics such as metal ‘hyperaccumulation’ and its exploitation in soil decontamination. Much of the most successful early work (‘classical’ plant nutrition) was done with field-grown crops with the aim of understanding the form, amount and timing of nutrient applications. The success of this research is illustrated by the high yields that can now be obtained when crops are adequately fed and also protected from pests and diseases. However, with the realisation that high fertilizer applications carry economic as well environmental costs, the emphasis over the last 20 years has switched to identifying opportunities for improving the efficiency with which nutrients are used, i.e. to obtain optimal yield and quality for minimal fertilizer use. For those interested in plant processes this has meant attempting to characterize the pathways through which nutrients are taken up and assimilated in order to identify those that might be beneficially manipulated. Today this means using high throughput ‘omics’ approaches to identify the network of gene products involved or, as the editors of this book put it, to define ‘the interactions between a plant's genome and its nutritional characteristics’.
