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Urea is widely used as a crop fertilizer because of its low cost. However, how this organic compound is absorbed and assimilated by plants is still poorly characterized. This chapter gives a general overview of how plants deal with urea and use it to support growth, covering the high- and low-affinity transport systems, which accounts for external urea uptake, intracellular remobilization and transport, as well as urea assimilation through the action of plant ureases. In addition, the ecological relevance of urea is discussed through some examples of organisms that live in habitats in which urea may be a preferential source of nitrogen. We believe that it is very important to study organisms that have a high potential for efficiently metabolizing urea in order to apply this knowledge to improve the nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) in plants, which is the topic of the last section of this chapter. |
