Mechanism of Nitrate Transport in Plants

Diwakar Shukla, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Diwakar Shukla, Alexander Moffett, Zahra Shamsi, Balaji Selvam, Chuankai Zhao, Shriyaa Mittal, Jiangyan Feng, Kevin Cheng, Jiming Chen, Matthew Chan, Pouyan Khakbaz, Soumajit Dutta

Nitrogen is an essential nutrient required for the plant growth and development. However, significant amount of applied nitrogen from fertilizers is not picked up by plants, which results in environmental damage and water pollution.

The current understanding of the nitrogen uptake process from the soil in the form of nitrate ions via membrane transporter proteins is limited by the lack of information at the molecular level. To address this challenge, we harness the computational power of Blue Waters and modern molecular-dynamics methods to obtain mechanistic insights into the nitrogen uptake process from soil at molecular level, with a particular focus on the role of transporter dimerization and phosphorylation in switching the transport rate. Finally, we explore the strategies to enhance the nitrogen transport rate via mutagenesis.