Urea is a secondary nitrogen metabolite in plants and has the highest nitrogencontent of commonly used solid nitrogenous fertilizers. This lowest transportationcost per unit of nitrogen nutrient, together with its high solubility in water andreadily assimilation by plants, makes urea a useful agronomical fertilizer. InArabidopsis, a single gene codes for an active urea transport system, the protonurea cotransporter AtDUR3 (Kojima et al.2006). When urea is the sole nitrogensource in the medium, theAtDUR3knockout line becomes chlorotic compared tothe wild type, in which AtDUR3transcript levels increase markedly under nitro-gen limiting conditions (Kojima et al.2007). How urea is relocalized and translocated across membranes for use as a nitrogen source is mostly unknown. As urea is uncharged, it diffuses slowly across membranes, and low affinity channelscould be important for facilitated relocation between different compartments.Members of the NIP, PIP, and TIP subfamilies have been shown to facilitatethe transport of urea across membranes (Gerbeau et al. 1999; Klebl et al. 2003;Liu et al.2003; Wallace and Roberts 2005). Vacuoles might be used for short-term storage of urea or to avoid toxic concentrations in the cytoplasm. Phenotypesassociated with TIP-mediated urea transport across the tonoplast ofArabidopsishave not been reported.
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