A plants' fitness to a large extent depends on its capacity to adapt to spatio-temporally varying environmental conditions. One such environmental condition to which plants display extensive phenotypic plasticity is soil nitrate levels and patterns. In response to heterogeneous nitrate distribution, plants show a so-called preferential foraging response. Herein root growth is enhanced in high nitrate patches and repressed in low nitrate locations beyond a level that can be explained from local nitrate sensing. Although various molecular players involved in this preferential foraging behavior have been identified, how these together shape root system adaptation has remained unresolved. Here we use a simple modeling approach in which we incrementally incorporate the known molecular pathways to investigate the combination of regulatory mechanisms that underly preferential root nitrate foraging. Our model suggests that instead of involving a growth suppressing supply signal, growth reduction on the low nitrate side may arise from reduced root foraging and increased competition for carbon. Additionally, our work suggests that the long distance CK signaling involved in preferential root foraging may function as a supply signal modulating demand signaling strength. We illustrate how this integration of demand and supply signals prevents excessive preferential foraging under conditions in which demand is not met by sufficient supply and a more generic foraging in search of nitrate should be maintained.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2020.00708 | DOI Listing |
Malar J
January 2025
Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Kreuzstrasse 2, 4123, Allschwil, Switzerland.
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View Article and Find Full Text PDFChaos
January 2025
Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 04510, Mexico.
We study an exactly solvable random walk model with long-range memory on arbitrary networks. The walker performs unbiased random steps to nearest-neighbor nodes and intermittently resets to previously visited nodes in a preferential way such that the most visited nodes have proportionally a higher probability to be chosen for revisit. The occupation probability can be expressed as a sum over the eigenmodes of the standard random walk matrix of the network, where the amplitudes slowly decay as power-laws at large times, instead of exponentially.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcol Evol
November 2024
Department of Grassland Resource and Ecology, College of Grassland Science and Technology China Agricultural University Beijing China.
Grazing livestock in grasslands face the challenge of obtaining sufficient nutrition due to uneven distribution of plant species and fluctuating vegetation productivity and nutrient levels. In northern China, and are the dominant perennial species in native grasslands, but they provide limited nutrition compared to forbs with higher crude protein (CP) content. While dietary ingredients can affect the nutritional intake of grazing livestock, the influence of different grazing strategies on dietary selection remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Food Prot
October 2023
Department of Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine - Cooperative Extension, University of California Davis. Davis, California 95616. Electronic address:
Sci Total Environ
December 2024
Departament de Recursos Marine Renovables, Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta, 37-49, 08003 Barcelona, Spain.
Human activities provide wildlife with highly abundant and predictable food subsidies, which can affect population dynamics and have wide-ranging ecological impacts. A key ecological question is how species adapt their foraging behaviour to capitalize on these new feeding opportunities. We investigate habitat use by Audouin's Gulls (Ichthyaetus audouinii) off the Western Mediterranean Sea, an opportunistic seabird that has recently expanded to diverse breeding colonies subjected to varying degrees of human influence.
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