New plant protein discoveries could ease global food and biobased product demands

In California, UC San Diego announced that 12 scientists report that new discoveries of the way plants transport important substances across their biological membranes to resist toxic metals and pests, increase salt and drought tolerance, control water loss and store sugar can have profound implications for increasing the supply of food and energy for our rapidly growing global population.

Their laboratories have recently discovered important properties of plant transport proteins that, collectively, could have a profound impact on global agriculture. One finding was how transport proteins control processes that allow roots to tolerate toxic aluminum. By engineering crops to convert aluminum ions into a non-toxic form, they said, agricultural scientists can now turn these unusable or low-yielding acidic soils into astonishingly productive farmland to grow crops for food, biofuels, and biochemicals.

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