Phosphorus (P) is an essential macronutrient for plant growth, and is
required in large quantities by elite varieties of crops to maintain yields.
Understanding how plants can maintain their yield with lower P inputs is
highly desirable. The team of Matthew J. Milner from The John Bingham
Laboratory in the UK studied the wheat (Triticum aestivum) TaPSTOL gene to
learn its role in phosphate nutrition and in other agronomically important
traits.



TaPSTOL is a single copy gene, which encodes a putative kinase protein, and
shares a high level of similarity to its rice homolog, OsPSTOL. The team
characterized the expression of TaPSTOL under different P concentrations and
found that its promoter was induced in root tips and hairs under P limiting
conditions. Overexpression of TaPSTOL in transgenic wheat lines resulted in
positive significant effects on root biomass, tiller number, and seed yield,
correlating with the expression of TaPSTOL while RNAi silencing resulted in
negative effects.



Manipulation of TaPSTOL in wheat shows that it is responsible for many of
phenotypic advantages as OsPSTOL except for yield. Furthermore, this study
shows that TaPSTOL contributes to agronomically important traits, including
flowering time and grain size.



[bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com]