Boron in Plant and Animal Nutrition

Abstract

The function of boron in plants has often been associated with cell wall bound insoluble boron. This was mainly due to the fact that B-related nutritional disorders clearly lead to a structural damage of the cell wall, and that the cell wall bound B-RGII-complex has been isolated and characterized in detail. However, more and more evidence indicates that other functions of B are important in plants, which can not be related to cell wall bound B-RGII. Rapid reactions under B deficiency, effects of B toxicity, and, most important of all, the observed essentiality of B for animals (Eckert, 1998, Eckert and Rowe, 1999), can not be explained by a structural function of B in the cell wall. Since animals do not have a pectin-rich cell wall, other B forms, e.g. free or loosely bound B, must be involved in those reactions.