Optimizing plant rhizosphere

Water scarcity is considered a major threat and a challenge that must be overcome in the twenty-first century. Therefore, increasing plant drought tolerance and improving the capacity of agricultural plants to optimally manage soil water depletion are imperative to sustain the increasing food demand caused by modern population growth trends. One mitigation strategy for sustaining world food production is to improve the capability of crops to optimize water extraction from soils.  A complementary plant strategy to increase the capture of water consists in modifying the environment where they grow, the rhizosphere.

The objective of this project is to understand the role of root hairs and mucilage on plant water uptake and transpiration. While it has been demonstrated that mucilage exudation and root hairs locally impact the rhizosphere hydraulic properties, their impact on plant scale transpiration remains largely unknown. In particular, it has been shown that the temporal evolution of root water-related traits was crucial to consider. How root hairs and mucilage alter plant hydraulic conductance and to which extent this change affects the water uptake distribution and regulates stress onset has never been quantitatively established.

We will use the combination of neutron radiography and heavy water (D2O) to measure the water fluxes of the maize with and without root hairs and with different levels of mucilage production. This will be performed in collaboration with Univ. of Bayreuth, Germany.