Towards Phosphorus Use Efficiency in Wheat; An Interdiciplinary Research

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The environmental impacts of agriculture have been a major concern among the agricultural and environmental scientific communities. The expansion of agriculture is thought to have resulted in loss of biodiversity, loss of habitat and adverse impact on soil condition. The intensification of agriculture may contribute to environmental pollution by chemical fertilizers and pesticides, degradation of water, and increased energy use. As an example since the 1960s, human use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has increased 9 fold, globally, while demand for phosphorus fertilizers has tripled. Therefore, meeting the world's future food security needs, while making progress towards reducing the adverse environmental impacts of agriculture is a global challenge.***Wheat (Triticum asetivum L.) is an important crop, world-wide, and with 1.9 million metric tonnes of annual production in Ontario, an important contributor to Ontario and Canadian economy. Considering that more than 90 % of the wheat crop in Ontario is winter-grown, it therefore plays a very important role as an integral part of the cropping system, in rotation with other crops, which not only offers diversity in the cropping system but also provides soil cover during the winter.***Phosphorus is among the essential and un-substitutable macro-nutrients for plant growth and development, on which crop production is heavily dependent. Phosphorus fertilizers are manufactured from phosphorus rock which is a finite resource, estimated to be depleting, on a global scale, in the next 50 to a maximum of 400 years. Therefore, the need to significantly reduce phosphorus losses and to avert a future phosphorus crisis is an important global concern. Varieties of crops with improved Phosphorus use efficiency (PUE) are believed to make a significant contribution to the sustainable use of phosphorus resources. This project will attempt to take a multi-disciplinary approach to contribute to a better understanding of mechanisms of PUE in wheat. These mechanisms may involve, but are not limited to root structures that increase accusation of phosphorus, root exudates such as phosphatases that assist in mining phosphorus from the sparingly available pools, and improved PUE to produce more dry matter and yield per unit of phosphorus uptake. This research will 1) study and dissect root morphological traits and identify simple and heritable traits influencing higher PUE, 2) develop improved phenotyping strategies for physiological and morphological traits related to PUE, 3) identify superior phenotypes under realistic field conditions with limited phosphorus availability, 4) identify regions in the wheat genome that contribute to an fficient use of phosphorus, and 5) identify and characterize the expression of candidate genes in the identified genomic regions. ********