Feeding World Population Amidst Depleting Phosphate Reserves: The Role of Biotechnological Interventions

Abstract

Phosphorus (P) is an important macronutrient affecting the growth and yield of all crop plants. Plants absorb P from the soil solution as inorganic phosphate (Pi). More than 70% of the arable land is deficient of Pi which demands the supply of an external source of synthetic P fertilizers to improve the yields. The P fertilizers are manufactured from non-renewable rock phosphate reserves which are expected to be exhausted within the next 100-200 years. This poses a great threat to food security since it is very difficult to meet the food production caused by increasing world population without the supply of an adequate P fertilizer. Several efforts have been made in the past decade to understand the mechanism of Pi uptake and its redistribution in plants. In this mini-review, we discuss the details on possible strategies to combat the crisis caused by loss of phosphate rock reserves and to improve the crop yield without much dependency on external P fertilizer. Approaches such as application of functional genomics studies to manipulate the expression levels of key transcription factors and genes involved in low Pi stress tolerance, molecular marker-assisted breeding to develop new varieties with improved yields under Pi-deficient soils and to recapture the Pi released in wastewaters for recycling back to the farm lands, will help improve the crop production without depending much on non-renewable P fertilizers and will also aid for the sustainable food production.