Mineral Nutrition of Plants Principles and Perspectives

Nearly all the chemical elements that make up living things are mineral elements, the ultimate source of which is rock weathered into soil. In the thoroughly revised second edition of Mineral Nutrition of Plants: Principles and Perspectives, Epstein and Bloom explain that plant roots "mine" these nutrient elements from their inorganic substrate and introduce them into the realm of living things. The authors trace the subsequent movement of these nutrients into other plant organs, tissues, cells, and organelles, their biochemical assimilation, and their functions in plant physiology and metabolism. Treatment of these processes extends from molecular biology through global biogeochemistry. The text, illustrated in full color, is accessible both to undergraduate students in plant physiology, agronomy, horticulture, and environmental studies and to researchers in these and other plant biological fields.

Emanuel Epstein is Research Professor in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources-Soils and Biogeochemistry at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Plant Physiology from the University of California at Berkeley. Among the awards and honors Dr. Epstein has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Senior Fulbright Research Scholarships. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and has served as President of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research interests include: mineral nutrition of plants; ion transport; salt relations of plants; silicon in plant biology; and genetic and ecological aspects of all these topics.

Arnold J. Bloom is Professor in the Department of Vegetable Crops at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. Widely published in scientific journals, Dr. Bloom has been a principal contributor (on mineral nutrition) to two editions of Plant Physiology (Lincoln Taiz and Eduardo Zeiger). His research focus is environmental stress physiology, with an emphasis on the interactions among nutrient acquisition and photosynthesis, temperature stress in crops, and root perception of the rhizosphere.