Early Warning System for Plant Nutrient Deficiency: Future Toolbox

Plant nutritionists across the globe are on their toes to find ways and means to identify nutrient constraints as early in standing crop season as possible while dealing with perennial crops. Exciting progress has been made over the years, and accordingly, the basis of nutrient management strategy has experienced many paradigm shifts [1]. While doing so, it is being increasingly felt to have some diagnostic tool to identify nutrient constraint as and when it originates by capturing the signals released at sub-cellular level. On the other hand, conventionally used diagnostic tools of identifying nutrient constraints such as leaf analysis [2,3], soil analysis [4-6], juice analysis [7], and to some extent, metalloenzyme-based biochemical analysis [8], all have been under continuous use and refinement. But despite so much of genuine efforts worldwide, no one of these alone provides complete information, except the combined use of leaf and soil analysis, which are used on a comparatively wider scale [9-12]. Establishment of absolute figures of normal, deficient or excess nutrient level is not real, unless the dynamic aspect of leaf nutrient concentration is considered, especially when various nutrients interactions produce resonance within close space of tissue composition.