Nitrogen is the most important macronutrient needed for plant growth and development. The availability of nitrogen in the soil fluctuates greatly in both time and space. Crop plants, except leguminous plants, depend on supply of nitrogen as fertilizers. Large quantities of nitrogen fertilizers are applied to crop plants, but only 33% of it is utilized by the plant. Plants have developed efficient mechanisms to sense the varying levels of nitrogen forms and uptake them. They also have well developed mechanisms to assimilate the incoming nitrogen immediately or translocate to different parts of the plant wherever it is needed. Maintenance of nitrogen homeostasis is essential to avoid toxicity. Apart from translocation and assimilation, plants have developed different mechanisms, nitrogen efflux; vacuolar nitrogen storage and downward transport of nitrogen from aerial parts to roots, for maintaining nitrogen homeostasis. In crop plants the "grain yield per unit of available nitrogen in the soil" is referred as the nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) for which remobilization of nitrogen, mediated by various transporters plays a crucial role. All these processes are tightly regulated by proteins and microRNA in response to both external and internal nitrogen levels, carbon status of the plant and hormones. As most crop plants are non-leguminous and depend on soil nitrogen, more production could be achieved if crop plants can be made to utilize the available nitrogen efficiently. The recent explosion of research information and the mechanisms behind nitrogen sensing, signaling, transport and utilization enables biotechnological interventions for better nitrogen nutrition of crop plants. This review discusses such possibilities in the context of recent understanding of nitrogen nutrition and the genomic revolution sweeping the crop science.

Reduction in fossil fuel consumption by using alternate sources of energy is a major challenge facing mankind in the coming decades. Bioethanol production using lignocellulosic biomass is the most viable option for addressing this challenge. Industrial bioconversion of lignocellulosic biomass, though possible now, is not economically viable due to presence of barriers that escalate the cost of production. As cellulose and hemicellulose are the major constituents of terrestrial biomass, which is available in massive quantities, hydrolysis of cellulose and hemicellulose by the microorganisms are the most prominent biochemical processes happening in the earth. Microorganisms possess different categories of proteins associated with different stages of bioethanol production and a number of them are already found and characterized. Many more of these proteins need to be identified which suit the specificities needed for the bioethanol production process. Discovery of proteins with novel specificities and application of genetic engineering technologies to harvest the synergies existing between them with the aim to develop consolidated bioprocess is the major direction of research in the future. In this review, we discuss the different categories of proteins used for bioethanol production in the context of breaking the barriers existing for the economically feasible lignocellulosic bioethanol production.

The interactions between crop plants and the endophytic bacteria colonizing them are poorly understood and experimental methods were found to be inadequate to meet the complexities associated with the interaction. Moreover, research on endophytic bacteria was focused at host plant species level and not at cultivar level which is essential for understanding the role played by them on the productivity of specific crop genotype. High throughput genomics offers valuable tools for identification, characterization of endophytic bacteria and understand their interaction with host plants. In this paper we report the use of high throughput plant genomic data for identification of endophytic bacteria colonizing rice plants. Using this novel next generation sequencing based computational method Sphingopyxis granuli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were identified as endophytes colonizing the elite indica rice cultivar RP Bio-226 and their draft genome sequences were assembled.

Rice yield is greatly influenced by the nitrogen and rice varieties show variation in yield. For understanding the role of urea nutrition in the yield of elite indica rice cultivar RPBio-226, the urea responsive transcriptome was sequenced and analyzed. The raw reads and the Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly project has been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession GDKM00000000. The version described in this paper is the first version, GDKM01000000.

Here, we report the genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain NCIM3107, used in bioethanol production. The genome size is approximately 11.8 Mb and contains 5,435 protein-coding genes.