Role of soil abiotic processes on phosphorus availability and plant responses with a focus on strigolactones in tomato plants

Abstract

Background: Phosphorus (P) is an essential nutrient for plant growth, taking part in primary cellular metabolic processes as a structural component of key biomolecules. Soil processes as adsorption, precipitation, and coprecipitation can affect P bioavailability, leading to limited plant growth and excessive use of P fertilizers, with adverse impacts on the environment and progressive depletion of P reserves. To cope with P stress, plants undergo several growth, development, and metabolic adjustments, aimed at increasing P-acquisition and -utilization efficiency. Recently, strigolactones (SLs) have emerged as newly defined hormones that mediate multiple levels of morphological, physiological and biochemical changes in plants as part of the P acclimation strategies to optimize growth. Therefore, understanding the soil processes affecting P availability and P acquisition strategies by plants can contribute to improved agronomical practices, resources optimization and environmental protection, and the development of plants with high P use efficiency for enhanced agricultural productivity. Scope: In this review, we discuss the range of abiotic processes that control P retention in soil and how different concentrations or degrees of P bioavailability can trigger various responses in plants, while critically highlighting the inconsistent conditions under which experiments evaluating aspects of P nutrition in plants have been conducted. We also present recent advances in elucidating the role of SLs in the complex P signalling pathway, with a special focus on what has been discovered so far in the model plant tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.).