Overexpression of the High-Affinity Nitrate Transporter OsNRT2.3b Driven by Different Promoters in Barley Improves Yield and Nutrient Uptake Balance

Improving nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) is very important for crops throughout the world. Rice mainly utilizes ammonium as an N source, but it also has four genes involved in nitrate transport. The transporter is important for maintaining cellular pH under mixed N supplies. Overexpression of this tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of molecular sciences 2020-02, Vol.21 (4), p.1320
Main Authors: Luo, Bingbing, Xu, Man, Zhao, Limei, Xie, Peng, Chen, Yi, Harwood, Wendy, Xu, Guohua, Fan, Xiaorong, Miller, Anthony J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
barley
nitrate transporter
nitrate uptake
nue
osnrt2.3b
yield
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Summary:Improving nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) is very important for crops throughout the world. Rice mainly utilizes ammonium as an N source, but it also has four genes involved in nitrate transport. The transporter is important for maintaining cellular pH under mixed N supplies. Overexpression of this transporter driven by a ubiquitin promoter in rice greatly improved yield and NUE. This strategy for improving the NUE of crops may also be important for other cereals such as wheat and barley, which also face the challenges of nutrient uptake balance. To test this idea, we constructed transgenic barley lines overexpressing . These transgenic barley lines overexpressing the rice transporter exhibited improved growth, yield, and NUE. We demonstrated that family members and the partner protein were also up-regulated by nitrate treatment (0.2 mM) in the transgenic lines. This suggests that the expression of and other family members were all up-regulated in the transgenic barley to increase the efficiency of N uptake and usage. We also compared the ubiquitin (Ubi) and a phloem-specific (RSs1) promoter-driven expression of . The Ubi promoter failed to improve nutrient uptake balance, whereas the RSs1 promoter succeed in increasing the N, P, and Fe uptake balance. The nutrient uptake enhancement did not include Mn and Mg. Surprisingly, we found that the choice of promoter influenced the barley phenotype, not only increasing NUE and grain yield, but also improving nutrient uptake balance.
ISSN:1422-0067
1422-0067
DOI:10.3390/ijms21041320