India imports almost 4.5 million tonnes of Diammonium phosphate (DAP), a phosphate fertilizer for agriculture. Rice occupies approximately 36% of India’s cultivable land and is therefore the largest consumer of phosphate (Pi) fertilizers. However, only about 20% of the applied phosphate fertilizer is utilized by the crop, while the rest becomes fixed in the soil. As a result, there is a need to improve rice for better phosphorus use efficiency. 

Dehydration greatly limits crop productivity, particularly in rain-fed areas across the world. Despite extensive research over the past several decades, little is known about dehydrationresponsive regulation of mitochondrial energy metabolism and adaptation in plants. In this study, we mapped the global changes in protein expression of mitochondrial landscape of rice.

Feedback inhibition loops are frequent in amino acid biosynthetic pathways to tightly regulate the accumulation of the end products. Greater knowledge of these mechanisms is important for understanding metabolic networks and should find application with plant breeders, for example, to avoid limitations on the production of amino acids essential for humans in crop plants.

Plants require phosphate (Pi) for proper growth and development but often face scarcity of this vital nutrient in the soil. Pi starvation triggers membrane lipid remodeling to utilize the membrane phospholipid-bound Pi in plants. In this process, phospholipids are replaced by non-Pi-containing galactolipids (monogalactosyldiacylglycerol, MGDG; digalactosyldiacylglycerol, DGDG) and sulfolipids.