UNLEASHING THE POTENTIAL OF NANOFERTILISATION TO IMPROVE NUTRIENT USE EFFICIENCY.

One of the most acute challenges in agriculture is to improve the efficiency of fertilisation to increase crop yields per unit area and simultaneously reduce climate and environmental footprints. Most soil based fertilisation strategies are remarkably inefficient due to chemical fixation, microbial immobilisation and leaching of nutrients to aqueous ecosystems. Nanofertilisation offers an attractive supplementary strategy as it allow us to manipulate the basic physico-chemical properties of mineral elements contained in nanoparticles and thereby bypass a range of those processes currently hampering an efficient uptake. Thus, bio-nanotechnology displays a range of emerging and fascinating possibilities, which pave the road to markedly improve nutrient use efficiency of both soil and foliar fertilisation. Here, we review how nanoparticles can be tailored with smart properties to better interact with root and leaf tissue for timely delivery of nutrients. Phosphorus fertilisation is used as a timely case to demonstrate how nanofertilisation can be developed to a stage where it can improve the poor phosphorus use efficiencies currently challenging modern agriculture on a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]