Digging in the dirt for life's biochemical f...( To learn more about nutrient uptake MS...)

To learn more about nutrient uptake, MSU researchers led by Shachar-Hill, along with collaborators at New Mexico State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture research center near Philadelphia, tagged nitrogen with easy-to-spot atomic markers and then watched as it traveled from soil to fungus to plant roots.

Many had assumed that the fungus would play a modest role. The team found, however, that the fungus acts more like a four-lane highway than a two-track country road in shuttling the nitrogen into plant roots. More than a third of the total nitrogen taken up by the plants came by way of the fungus, Shachar-Hill and his collaborators report in the June 9 issue of Nature.

"The really fascinating part is the mechanism underlying the transfer process," says Maria Harrison, a plant biologist at Cornell University's Boyce Thompson Institute and an expert on fungus-facilitated movement of other soil nutrients into plant roots. "Dr. Shachar-Hill and his colleagues were able to show that the fungus acquires the nitrogen from the soil and then links it to carbon and moves this combination molecule towards the plant. Then just before delivery to the plant cell, it unhitches the carbon and releases only the nitrogen to the plant."

The researchers demonstrated the results in a highly controlled laboratory environment, so "the big challenge now will be to see whether the same mechanism is important for entire plants growing in symbiosis [partnership] with the fungi in soil, where other nitrogen sources may be more easily available," Fitter says. "Moving to the field is always difficult but rewarding."

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Contact: Yair Shachar-Hill
yairhill@msu.edu
517-355-4683
Michigan State University
8-Jun-2005

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