19th-22nd June, 2017: Green for Good Meeting G4G IV Conference, Olomouc, Czech Republic

[Z. Klencsar]

The Green for Good Meeting G4G IV Conference was held during the days June 19 - 22, 2017 in Olomouc, Czech Republic. At the conference Viktória Halasy, MSc student of Biology at the Department of Plant Physiology and Molecular Plant Biology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, presented a poster regarding the possible use of ferrihydrite nanoparticles in alleviating human nutritional disorders associated with iron deficiency. The poster can be downloaded from here: http://esr.hu/plantnano/posters/2017_g4g_iv.pdf

Viktória Halasy, Zsuzsanna Farkas, Fruzsina Pankaczi, Krisztina Kovács, Ferenc Fodor, Zoltán Klencsár, Zoltán Homonnay, László Tamás, Ádám Solti, Sára Pólya:

Cucumber and nanoparticles: Can C. sativus utilise nanoferrihydrite as iron source?

One of the leading human nutritional disorder is iron deficiency. Plants provide the prior source of iron in the human consumption. However the soil does not meet the requirements of agriculture due to alkaline pH or high carbonate content. Nanoparticles, like nanoferrihydrite as fertilizer can provide a solution to iron precipitation in alkaline condition. Plants acquire iron from the rhisosphere in different ways. Cucumber use the reduction-based strategy, known as Strategy I. Ferric-chelate oxidoreductase (Fro) genes encode the key enzyme of Strategy I, an iron deficiency-inducible membrane bounded enzyme responsible for the reduction of iron at the root surface. The cucumber's genome is known since 2009, which opens the door to gene expression studies. We identified two homologs of A.thaliana Fro genes in the cucumber genome. In order to investigate the bioutilization of iron nanoparticles in cucumber roots, iron deficient plants was regenerated by nanoferrihydrite in hydroponics. The Fro gene is overexpressed by iron deficiency, the dynamics of Fro expression was monitored until the full recovery on transcriptional level by qRT-PCR and also on proteomic level by reductase activity assay. Based on our results iron containing nanoparticles, such as nanoferrihydrite could be applied as fertiliser ingredient, which provide a way to produce iron-fortified vegetables.

This work has been supported by the grants NKFIH PD-112047 and NKFIH K115913. Á. Solti was also supported by the Bolyai János Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BO/00207/15/4).