Chapter 5 - Changing Environmental Condition and Phosphorus-Use Efficiency in Plants

Abstract

Intensive use of phosphorus (P) in agriculture has raised concerns about its sustainability due to potential resource scarcity and its nonudicious use, which has led to serious environmental pollution. Plants possess a number of adaptive mechanisms to cope with phosphorus stress leading to changes at morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels. A comprehensive understanding of these adaptive responses is required to improve phosphorus-uptake efficiency, partitioning, and utilization, together with other agronomic approaches, which would result in meeting the sustainability challenge of phosphorus delivery to crops. Phosphorus is often an important limiting factor for crop yields, but rock phosphate as fertilizer is a nonrenewable resource and expected to become scarce in the future. High phosphorus input levels in agriculture have led to environmental problems. One of the ways to tackle these issues simultaneously is by improving the phosphorus-use efficiency of crops through breeding.