This blog contains information about Plant Nutrition. In the start, it defines what is the term Nutrition and tells its importance. Then it explains the meaning and importance of Plant Nutrition in detail. It also elaborates what are Essential Nutrients and mention their names. Then it has a brief description on working of 4 most Essential Nutrients for plants that are Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorus and Calcium. This blog contains Plant Nutrition and Essential Nutrients for Plants.
What is Nutrition?
Nutrition is the balanced and most suitable diet of an organism or living system. This contains regular and well-suited elements that help in growth and survival of a living organism. If the nutrition or diet is healthy, the individual will be healthy. If the diet, food and nutrition is not proper, the living system is not healthy. Nutrition has not just limited to humans, plants also have their proper nutrition and changes in them cause death or decay of plants. In this blog we will discuss Plant nutrition and essential nutrients required for plants.
Plant Nutrition:
The accurate amount of essential nutrients for proper growth and mechanism of plants, we call it plant nutrition. It contains some essential elements that plants needs to grow properly. As we know that plants are essential for maintaining the air quality and removing CO2 from the air to avoid Global Warming. If plant nutrition is taken for granted, the plants become yellow and their mechanisms are disturbed. Some essential nutrients must be available for proper growth of plants.
Essential Nutrients for Plant Growth:
In higher plants. chlorine has been shown to be necessary for growth and is generally classed as “essential.” However, by the rigid definition it would not be so classy for bromine may substitute for the chlorine, though at higher concentrations. One last illustration supporting the advantage of the looser definition of plant nutrient “essentiality” is the case of sodium. Using the rigid definition, this element would not consider essential. However, we know it from years to increase the yields of several crops, such as sugar beets, celery, table beets, and turnips. This blog contains Plant Nutrition and Essential Nutrients for plants. These nutrients help plants to hold the soil and keep the plant healthy in every way.
Following are the names of essential nutrients for plant growth:
Potassium
Calcium
Iron
Sulfur
Copper
Chlorine
All these nutrients are essential for plant growth either in large quantities or as trace elements. This blog contains Plant nutrition and Essential Nutrients required for plants.
Most Essential Nutrients for Plants:
Here is the detail of some Most Essential Nutrients for Plants:
Nitrogen:
Nitrogen is a vitally important plant nutrient which can be in man’s control. It is absorbed by plants primarily in the form of nitrates, though smaller amounts of other forms can be absorbed including the ammonium ion and urea. In moist, warm, well-aerated soils most of the nitrogen compounds will be converted to the NOs form. Once in the plant the nitrate is reduce to ammonium N using the energy by photosynthesis. The NH,+-N so produced is combined with so called “carbon skeletons”, to form glutamic acid, which is in turn elaborated into over 100 different amino acids.
Twenty or twenty-one of the different amino acids are then joined together through peptide linkages to form proteins. The order in which these amino acids are linked together is controlled by the genetic makeup of the plant. As a result, though environmental factors, and especially the amount of N supplied to the crops, may affect the amount of protein produced, the kind of protein is largely controlled by genetic
factors.
The proteins formed in plant cells are largely functional rather than structural; that is, they are enzymes. As such, they control the metabolic processes that take place in plants including those involved in the reduction of NO, and the synthesis of protein. So, the products of protein are essential to the synthesis process itself. These functional proteins are not stable entities, of course, for they are continually degrade and resynthesize.
Additional Role of Nitrogen:
In addition to its role in the formation of proteins, nitrogen is an integral part of the chlorophyll molecule. This molecule consists essentially of a central magnesium atom around which are coordination of four pyrrole rings, each of which contains one nitrogen and four carbon atoms. The nitrogen bonds are with those of the carbon and magnesium atoms.
Deficiency of Nitrogen in Plants:
When plants are deficient in nitrogen, they become stunted and yellow in appearance. This yellowing, or chlorosis, usually appears first on the lower leaves; the upper leaves remain green. In cases of severe nitrogen shortage the leaves will turn brown and die. In grasses the lower leaves beginning at the leaf tip and progressing usually “fire,” or turn brown, along the midrib until the entire leaf is dead.
Phosphorus:
Phosphorus, with nitrogen and potassium, is classed as a major nutrient element. It occurs in most plants, however, in quantities that are much smaller than those of nitrogen and potassium. It is generally consider that plants absorb most of their phosphorus as the primary orthophosphate ion, H,PO,. Smaller amounts of the secondary orthophosphate ion, HPO, times as many absorption , are absorbed. In fact, there are about ten on sites on plant roots for H,PO, as there are for HPO*-. The relative amounts of these two ions, which will absorb by plants, affects by the pH of the medium surrounding the roots. Lower pH values will increase the absorption of the H P O , ion, whereas, higher pH values will increase absorption of the HPO,?- form.
Forms of Phosphorus:
Other forms of phosphorus, among which are pyrophosphates and metaphosphates, may possibly be absorbed by plant roots. Both ionic forms are in certain fertilizer phosphates. Potassium and calcium metaphosphates produce in limited amounts in the United States for several years by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and used in experimental sales and educational programs. TVA has developed a series of calcium, potassium, and ammonium polyphosphates in which the pyrophosphate ion predominates. Because both meta- and pyrophosphates hydrolyze in aqueous solutions, their absorption as such is limits to an extent. Regardless of the form of phosphate actually absorbed by the plant, pyrophosphates and metaphosphates are good sources of fertilizer phosphorus.
Plants may also absorb certain soluble organic phosphates. Nucleic acid and phytin are absorb in by plants from sterile sand or solution cultures. Both compounds may occur as degradation products of the decomposition of soil organic matter and as such can utilize directly by growing plants. Because of their instability in the presence of an active microbial population, however, their importance as sources of phosphorus as such for higher plants under field conditions is in a limit.
Effects of Phosphorus:
An adequate supply of phosphorus associates with greater strength of cereal straw. The quality of certain fruit, forage, vegetable, and grain crops should be improve and disease resistance should increase when they are adequate supply of this element. Phosphorus mobilize in plants, and, when a deficiency occurs, the element contain in the older tissues is transfer it to the active meristematic regions.
Potassium:
The third so-called major element required for plant growth is potassium. Plants absorb it as the potassium ion K+ and is present in soils in varying amounts, but the fraction of the total potassium in the exchangeable or plant available form is usually small.
Fertilizer potassium is into soils in the form of such soluble salts as potassium chloride, potassium sulfate, potassium nitrate, and potassium-magnesium sulfate. Plant requirements for this element are quite high. When potassium is present in short supply, characteristic deficiency symptoms appear in the plant.
Potassium is a mobile element which is translocated to the younger, meristematic tissues fi a shortage occurs. As a result, the deficiency symptoms usually appear first on the lower leaves of annual plants,
progressing toward the top as the severity of the deficiency increases. Unlike nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and several others, potassium apparently does not form an integral part of such plant components as protoplasm, fats, and cellulose. Its function appears rather to be catalytic in nature.
Essential Physiological Functions of Potassium:
- Carbohydrate metabolism or formation and breakdown and translocation of starch.
- Nitrogen metabolism and synthesis of proteins.
- Control and regulation of activities of various essential mineral elements.
- Neutralization of physiologically important organic acids.
- Activation of various enzymes.
- Promotion of the growth of meristematic tissue.
- Adjustment of stomatal movement and water relations.
Deficiency of Potassium:
Potassium deficiencies greatly reduce crop yields. In fact, serious yield reductions may result without the appearance of deficiency symptoms. This phenomenon is hidden hunger and is not necessarily restricts to the element potassium. Potassium deficiency associates with a decrease in resistance to certain plant diseases. A shortage of the element is to increase powdery mildew of wheat and in some cases wheat-stem sawfly damage. Root rot and winter killing of alfalfa are greater with an inadequate potassium supply.
Calcium:
Calcium is an element that higher plants needs to grow properly; plants absorb it as the ion Ca2+, it is in abundant quantities in the leaves of plants and, in some species, in plant cells precipitated as calcium oxalate. It may also occur in the ionic form in cell sap A deficiency of calcium manifests itself in the failure of the terminal buds of plants to develop. The same applies to the apical tips of roots. As a result of these two phenomena, plant growth ceases in the absence of an adequate supply.
Experiment on Corn plant:
In corn a shortage of calcium prevents the emergence and unfolding of the new leaves, whose tips are almost colorless and cover with a sticky gelatinous material which causes them to adhere to one another. The specific physiological functions by calcium in plants are not describe clearly.
Classically, calcium has been considered as necessary to the formation of the middle lamellae of cells because of its alleged role in the synthesis of calcium pectate. Some early research, which seems not to have received much attention, continues to throw doubt on the importance of calcium in this particular plant function. Fourteen types of plant tissue were analyze for pectate ( as pectic acid after these tissues was handle in four different ways.
One set was dried at 98°C. in a hot air oven, another at 70°C. in a vacuum, a third sundried, and in the last group the fresh tissues were placed directly in the boiling alcohol. Pectic acid was absent in thirteen of the fourteen samples of tissue that immerse in the boiling alcohol. It was present, however, in all samples subjected to the three drying treatments at elevated temperatures.
The conclusion was that there is no pectate normally present in most living plant tissues and that the presence of this material in the samples subject to the three drying treatments was an artifact. In a comparatively recent paper it says that calcium is a constituent of the middle lamella, but it did not specify that the lamella derives from Ca pectate.
These were the four most essential nutrients for plant growth. This blog contains Plant Nutrition and Essential Nutrients required for plant growth.
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