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 Nitrogen (N) is an essential nutrient to plant growth. Grain yields of maize and other important cereals are highly responsive to supplemental nitrogen. The use of N fertilizers has been dramatically increased during the last few decades. However, such high usage increases crop input costs, negatively impacts the environment by leaching the N fertilizers into the groundwater and volatizing them into the air as a greenhouse gas, and raises the energy requirement for crop production. Therefore, understanding genes controlling N uptake from soil, assimilation into amino acids, and N transport from vegetative source to reproductive sink tissues will help develop varieties with improved nitrogen use efficiency (NUE). Nengyi Zhang is a postdoc leading this research. We collaborate with Drs. Steve Moose and Fred Below, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to dissect the whole plant physiological aspects of NUE. With Dr. Mark Stitt, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Germany, we are collaborating to identify natural variation in nitrogen metabolism pathway at the enzyme and metabolite level.
 This work is funded by a NSF project, Gene Discovery for Maize Responses to Nitrogen (NitroGENES).
(c) Kanehisa Laboratories
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