Yuanyuan Bu^1,2 , Tetsuo Takano² , Keisuke Nemoto² , Shenkui Liu¹

1. Alkali Soil Natural Environmental Science Center, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, 150040, P.R. China
2. Department of Applied Biological Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 1-1-1 Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8657, Japan
Author    Correspondence author
Genomics and Applied Biology, 2011, Vol. 2, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/gab.2011.02.0003
Received: 06 Sep., 2011    Accepted: 20 Oct., 2011    Published: 03 Nov., 2011

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Bu et al., 2011, Research Progress of Ammonium Transporter in Rice Plants, Genomics and Applied Biology, 2011, Vol. 2, No. 3 (DOI: 10.5376/gab.2011.02.0003)

 

Plant taken up from the soil have two inorganic forms, ammonium ion (NH₄⁺) and nitrate ion (NO₃^-), but rice grows in flooded paddy fields and takes up ammonium as the preferred nitrogen (N) source. Ammonium uptake is predominantly mediated by ammonium transporters in the plasm membrane. Ammonium transporter genes (AMTs) have been cloned and identified in many organisms.So far, total 12 AMT proteins identified in rice, containing 10~11 transmembrane domains, except OsAMT4 and OsAMT5.2. In this review, we summarized the gene expression and regulation of ammonium transporters under different nitrogen conditions. Effective NH₄⁺ uptake can provide a favorable protection for improving of agricultural production.

Rice; Ammonium transporter; Nitrogen assimilation; Glutamine synthetase