Dechipering sulfur interaction with essential and non-essential elements in the rhizosphere
Author(s)
Coppa, Eleonora
Date Issued
July 22, 2020
Type
Doctoral Thesis
Abstract
Human world population is expected to increase to 10 billion by 2050 (UN 2015), and a key challenge is to provide food and feed in an equitable, healthy, and sustainable manner. Access to adequate and nutritious food is essential to human wellbeing, but to reach this objective global food production needs to increase by 70% by 2050. A healthy soil is the major factor for agriculture production, but soil resources are finite and non-renewable over the human time scale. Both natural forces and mostly anthropogenic activities (e.g., deforestation, drainage, tillage, ecc) led to soil degradation and consequently to limited access to high-quality soil for provisioning of essential ecosystem services. The scarcity of healthy soil to obtain the required food production will thus imply the exploitation of marginal agricultural land, characterized by depletion of organic matter and nutrients, elemental imbalance leading to deficiency or toxicity, salinization, water-air imbalance. Over the last 50 years, the combined outcome of significant reductions in S emission from industrial sources, use of mineral fertilizers without S, decreases in use of organic fertilizers, and changes in cropping systems including the use of high yielding commercial coupled with intensive management practices have led to a widespread S deficiency in soils at the global scale.
Sulfur is not only essential for optimal plant growth, development and crop productivity, but also for its contribution to the mitigation of stressful conditions in plants and, more importantly, for its
integration with other nutrient uptake and metabolic pathways. As a result, plant physiological
responses to environmental stresses, such as nutrient deficiency or toxicity, could be modified and
even hampered by S deficiency. These evidences highlight the importance to discuss the interactions S has with other elements (essential or not) in the rhizosphere.
Depletion of nutrients, elemental toxicity and salinization represent common stress factors that plants commonly experience in their natural habitat and most important limiting factors for agricultural production. Therefore, in this thesis, S implications on physiological responses to soil Fe deficiency, Cu pollution and Na accumulation were studied.
Additional information
Dottorato di ricerca in Scienze delle produzioni vegetali e animali
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