J.D. Franco-Navarro

Spanish National Research Council | CSIC · Department of Plant Biotechnology

Chloride (Cl–) is a micronutrient that accumulates to macronutrient levels since it is normally available in nature and actively taken up by higher plants. Besides a role as an unspecific cell osmoticum, no clear biological roles have been explicitly associated with Cl– when accumulated to macronutrient concentrations. To address this question, the...

Three biochars (B1: pine wood, B2: paper-sludge, B3: sewage-sludge) produced under controlled pyrolysis conditions and one produced in kilns (B4: grapevine wood) were used as organic ameliorants in a Calcic Cambisol, which represents a typical agricultural soil of the Mediterranean region. This field study was performed with plants of sunflower (He...

Chloride (Cl⁻) has been recently described as a beneficial macronutrient, playing specific roles in promoting plant growth and water use efficiency (WUE). However, it is still unclear how Cl⁻ could be beneficial, especially in comparison with nitrate (NO3⁻), an essential macronutrient that shares with Cl⁻ similar physical and osmotic properties, as...

In recent years a change in the traditional cropping model under rain-fed regime is being transformed into intensive and superintensive olive groves undergoing fertilization and irrigation. This means the use of low vigor cultivars of early entry into production and higher branching habit like Arbequina, currently the most used cultivar in super hi...

Although Cl- has been characterized as a micronutrient, we have observed that when available in the millimolar range (e.g. 1-5 mM), higher plants accumulate Cl- to levels that are typical of the content of a macronutrient (Plant Cell Env. plants when accumulated to macronutrient levels. Given that Cl- is a major osmotically active solute in the pla...

Anthropogenic activities have aggravated the effects of global climate change on ecosystems. Plants, because of their inability to escape from an adverse environment, suffer to a great extent from stresses, which can negatively impact their growth and development. Global warming is increasingly causing extreme climatic situations such as very high...

This editorial introduces a Research Topic which collects publications that study in detail the resilience mechanisms (tolerance and/or resistance) developed by plants to successfully cope with different biotic and abiotic stresses related to climate change at morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels. By promoting discussions...

Una familia se plantea con ilusión tener descendencia y vivir una serie de momentos idílicos con sus futuros hijos/as. Las parejas no se plantean el hecho de ser “elegidos al azar” con un bebé que pueda padecer el síndrome Treacher Collins, dado que este síndrome afecta a 2 de cada 100.000 nacimientos. El primer planteamiento es que, aunque se real...

The human being, in his anthropocentric vision, has been motivated by the study of everything that affects him in all its versions. From their interaction with the environment, to their behavior in society, Homo sapiens have developed many strategies that have allowed them to survive until today. Studies of anatomical vestiges have made it possible...

Una familia se plantea con ilusión tener descendencia y vivir una serie de momentos idílicos con sus futuros hijos/as. Las parejas no se plantean el hecho de ser “elegidos al azar” con un bebé que pueda padecer el síndrome Treacher Collins, dado que este síndrome afecta a 2 de cada 100.000 nacimientos. El primer planteamiento es que, aunque se real...

Chloride (Cl⁻) and nitrate ( NO 3 − ) are closely related anions involved in plant growth. Their similar physical and chemical properties make them to interact in cellular processes like electrical balance and osmoregulation. Since both anions share transport mechanisms, Cl⁻ has been considered to antagonize NO 3 − uptake and accumulation in plants...

El anión cloruro (Cl-) se ha descrito como micronutriente esencial para las plantas superiores, con umbrales de deficiencia en torno a 0.2 mg/g PS para la mayor parte de las plantas glicófitas, siendo necesario en pequeñas trazas para cumplir una serie de funciones vitales para las plantas como: cofactor del fotosistema-II y de algunas enzimas; la...

Defensa de mi tesis titulada "Funciones del cloruro como macronutriente beneficioso en plantas superiores", en la Universidad de Sevilla el día 8 de julio del 2022. Este trabajo ha sido realizado en el IRNAS, perteneciente al CSIC, y ha sido financiado por varios Proyectos nacionales de investigación y por la comisión europea. La tesis ha sido diri...

The chloride anion (Cl-) has traditionally been considered a detrimental element for agriculture due to its antagonism with the nitrate anion (NO3-), and its toxicity when it accumulates in high concentrations in salinity conditions. On the other hand, Cl- is an essential micronutrient for higher plants, being necessary in small traces to fulfill a...

🇪🇸 El arte no solamente está relegado a la capacidad artística del ser humano, sino que también se encuentra en la naturaleza de forma espontánea, formando complejas estructuras geométricas, de vivos colores, con patrones matemáticos. Este arte basado en las matemáticas y la geometría no solo lo encontramos a simple vista (nivel macroscópico) ya se...

Revista de divulgación científica Hidden nature número 16 sobre Ciencia y Arte: Cienciarte

El Grupo RIH (CSIC- 891717) desarrolla actividad de investigación básica, aplicada, transferencia a empresas y prestaciones de Servicio de I+D+i. El Grupo RIH se crea en el IRNAS en 2019, aunque sus líneas de investigación se iniciaron con antelación en el seno del Grupo “Salinidad”. Las dos líneas principales actualmente en desarrollo son: 1) Estu...

Although defined as an essential micronutrient, chloride (Cl-) accumulates in plants to typical macronutrient levels. Our laboratory has recently shown that, at macronutrient concentrations, Cl- improves the plant efficiency in the use of water, nitrogen and CO2 (Franco-Navarro et al., 2016, 2019; Colmenero-Flores et al. 2019; Rosales et al., 2020)...

Chloride (Cl-) is an essential micronutrient recently defined as a beneficial macronutrient for plants, with new specific functions that improve the efficiency in the use of water (WUE), nitrogen (NUE) and CO2. Nitrate (NO3-) and Cl- are the most abundant inorganic anions in plants, sharing physical and osmoregulatory properties, transport mechanis...

In this popular science article, we tell the story of the curious life of the jellyfish Turritopsis nutricola/dohrnii, a jellyfish capable of reversing its life cycle as an adult jellyfish and returning to the polyp phase, thus living forever and generating clones of itself. We not only explain the biology of the jellyfish but also take a fun cultu...

From ancient times, one of the aquatic areas of greatest human interest has been the marshes. Their connection to the sea, as well as being the estuary of rivers and an area rich in resources, has meant that they are not only an ecosystem with a wide variety of species but also regions where the probability of colonisation by invasive species is qu...

Chloride (Cl−), traditionally considered harmful for agriculture, has recently been defined as a beneficial macronutrient with specific roles that result in more efficient use of water (WUE), nitrogen (NUE), and CO2 in well-watered plants. When supplied in a beneficial range of 1-5 mM, Cl− increases leaf cell size, improves leaf osmoregulation, and...

Revista de divulgación científica Hidden Nature sobre Biología Evolutiva

Chloride (Cl −), traditionally considered a toxic anion in agriculture, has been recently defined as a beneficial macronutrient with specific roles that result in more efficient use of water (WUE), nitrogen (NUE) and CO2 in well-watered plants. When supplied in a beneficial range of 1-5 mM, Cl − increases leaf cell size, improves leaf osmoregulatio...

Stephen Jay Gould was born on 10 September 1941 in the Bayside community of Queens, New York, and was raised in a secular (non-practising) Jewish home, hence he considered himself agnostic all his life. His parents instilled in him progressive values, which led him in the 1960s even to demonstrate against venues that barred people of African descen...

Tomato, potato, eggplant, or the wide world of chilies or peppers, despite their great variety of aspects, all belong to the same family of plant species: the Solanaceae. This family not only includes species with nutritional interest but also plants with ornamental and medicinal character, including others that are potentially poisonous for many o...

"Tomato, potato, aubergine or the wide world of chillies or peppers, despite their great variety of aspects, all belong to the same family of plant species: the Solanaceae. This family not only includes species with nutritional interest, but also plants with ornamental and medicinal character, including others that are potentially poisonous for man...

Konrad Lorenz gained worldwide recognition in the field of zoology and ethology and was considered the 'father of ethology'. His research goal and main focus was to study the learning processes of birds, especially early bird nesters, such as wild geese (Anser anser L.) or jackdaws (Corvus monedula L.). He also dedicated books to many other species...

Revista de divulgación científica Hidden Nature 13 sobre Etología

Conferencia impartida en el marco de la semana tecnológica 2020, Tecnológico Nacional de Mexico, IRAPUATO, GUANAJUATO.

The human being has been genetically modifying plant and animal organisms for millennia to meet the needs of the population. Intelligence and reason provide us with tools that allow us to evolve as social organisms in a changing world, in which we will have to face future handicaps, such as climate change or the increase in pollution, and we will a...

Genetic improvement is the process responsible for modifying or selecting animal or plant organisms for various purposes such as resistance or tolerance to abiotic or biotic stress, increasing productivity, or acquiring properties of other organisms. This is done both for its economic interest and for the interest of the resources provided by said...

Paradoxically, the results of the environmental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have perplexed many researchers around the world. This confinement has reduced emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases. In China during the pandemic, CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas, etc.) were reduced by up to 25%....

Revista de divulgación científica Hidden Nature sobre Organismos Modificados Genéticamente

El cloruro es un micronutriente esencial que tradicionalmente se ha considerado perjudicial para la agricultura por su efecto tóxico en salinidad y por competir con el nitrato. Sin embargo, recientemente hemos descubierto que la fertilización con cloruro confiere unas funciones beneficiosas para las plantas, cuando el cloruro se acumula en hoja a n...

Ozone therapy is the use of Ozone (O3) for medical purposes for the treatment of infectious diseases or diseases of various kinds (take a look at all the publications by Velio Bocci, a researcher at the University of Siena, Italy). The basic mechanism of action is due to its properties as (i) biocide, with the inactivation of viruses, bacteria, fun...

Seedlings are more sensitive to ozone than adult plants, but there are several papers that reports a beneficial effect in seedlings treated with ozone. This has a great relevance in the ornamental plants market and in agriculture.

On April 25, 1998, the Aznalcóllar (Seville, Spain) mining raft broke, and caused the leakage of more than six million liters of polluting water and pyritic sludge, causing the greatest environmental disaster in Spain ever known. In this article of scientific dissemination, we make a journey through the history of the Guadiamar River, explaining h...

Revista de divulgación científica número 11 sobre Contaminación

Wild subspecies of Olea europaea constitute a source of genetic variability with huge potential for olive breeding to face global changes in Mediterranean-climate regions. We intend to identify wild olive genotypes with optimal adaptability to different environmental conditions to serve as a source of rootstocks and resistance genes for olive breed...

Chloride (Cl–) has traditionally been considered harmful to agriculture because of its toxic effects in saline soils and its antagonistic interaction with nitrate (NO3–), which impairs NO3– nutrition. It has been largely believed that Cl– antagonizes NO3– uptake and accumulation in higher plants, reducing crop yield. However, we have recently uncov...

Revista de divulgación científica Hidden Nature 10 sobre Especies Exóticas Invasoras

The problem of the concept of INVASIVE EXOTIC SPECIES is in those species considered as such, which either do not have an invasive growth and propagation behaviour, or they are so naturalized and so adapted to the environment that they are already part of it, due to the very long time they have been in the place since they were imported. This is th...

This is a popular scientific article published in the journal Hidden Nature. Syphilis is a chronic infectious disease, which is due to the systemic spread of the spirochete bacteria Treponema pallidum spp. pallidum. In this popular article, we go back to the Columbian and pre-Columbian times to understand when it all started. The article is written...

Revista de divulgación científica número 8 Hidden Nature sobre VIRUS

Revista número 9 de Hidden Nature sobre Infecciones de Transmisión Sexual

This is a popular scientific article published in the journal Hidden Nature. The article is about the citrus sadness disease, a disease that affected all bitter orange rootstocks worldwide since the beginning of the XX century, causing huge economic losses. The article is written in Spanish.

The web application is a script designed to facilitate the manual counting of different elements present in an image (for example, bald lysis in a petri dish; different cell types in an animal or vegetative tissue; elements of aerial images, etc.). For this purpose, a web interface is written in PHP (in addition to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) suppor...

Chloride (Cl−) has traditionally been considered a micronutrient largely excluded by plants due to its ubiquity and abundance in nature, its antagonism with nitrate (NO3−), and its toxicity when accumulated at high concentrations. In recent years, there has been a paradigm shift in this regard since Cl− has gone from being considered a harmful ion,...

At the cellular level, osmoregulatory mechanisms have been described by which inorganic ion fluxes, particularly potassium (K+), nitrate (NO3-), chloride (Cl-) and sodium (Na+), play key roles in drought acclimatization responses like: uptake of K+, Cl¿ and Na+ for rapid turgor recovery of mesophyll and root cells; and release of K+, NO3- and Cl- i...

Chloride (Cl-) is considered a micronutrient because it is supposed to be needed in a small quantity for a healthy growth in higher plants, however, Cl- is a strange micronutrient since actual Cl- concentration in plants is typical of the content of a macronutrient (about 50-300 times higher than the content required as essential micronutrient, Mar...

Chloride (Cl−) nutrition at macronutrient levels significantly increases the size of leaf cells, resulting in a reduction in stomatal density and, therefore, conductance (gs). At the same time, Cl− improves mesophyll diffusion conductance to CO2 (gm) due, at least in part, to increased surface area of chloroplasts exposed to the intercellular airsp...

Revista Hidden Nature de Divulgación Científica sobre Etnobotánica

Se considera históricamente al médico griego Pedanius Dioscórides como el padre de la etnobotánica, o en otras palabras, de la farmacopea. Su libro de cinco tomos titulado “De materia medica” (Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς), recoge gran parte del conocimiento existente en esta materia hasta el siglo 70 d.C., y sorprendentemente, fue la única guía de plantas m...

En este seminario de caracter divulgativo científico, se trató de acercar a grandes rasgos a los estudiantes de primeros años de carrera, e incluso a adolescentes de ultimo año de instituto, como surgió la vida en la tierra, como se diversificó, como interactuó con ella la evolución, e introducimos algunos conceptos básicos como la nomenclatura bin...

Although Cl- has been characterized as a micronutrient, we have observed that when available in the millimolar range (e.g. 1-5 mM), higher plants accumulate Cl- to levels that are typical of the content of a macronutrient (Plant Cell Env. 2010, 33: 2012-27). Since this requires a considerable cost of energy, we speculate whether Cl- might play a po...

INTRODUCTION. An antagonistic effect on nitrate (NO 3-) uptake, transport and accumulation has long been attributed to chloride (Cl-). For this reason and its toxic effects in saline soils, Cl-has been traditionally considered deleterious for agriculture. However, we have recently reported Cl-as a beneficial macronutrient for higher plants since it...

Chloride (Cl-) is a micronutrient that accumulates to macronutrient levels since it is normally available in nature and actively taken up by higher plants. Besides a supposedly unspecific role as cell osmoticum, no clear biological roles had been explicitly associated with Cl- when accumulated to macronutrient concentrations until our group publish...

Chloride (Cl-) is a micronutrient that accumulates to macronutrient levels since it is normally available in nature and actively taken up by higher plants. Besides a supposedly unspecific role as cell osmoticum, no clear biological roles had been explicitly associated with Cl- when accumulated to macronutrient concentrations until our group publish...

Plants are planted in peat. The aerial part (stems, leaves...) is cut with a scalpel. The pots are then immersed in irrigation solution and hermetically sealed. We obtain the drops that sprout from the xylem sap at different times (1h, 2h, 3h, 5h). You can measure the ions of interest in the xylem, the volume, sugars, and other elements. For more...

Este proyecto pretende aunar en una sola base de datos, toda la información existente sobre las especies silvestres de plantas Vasculares de la península ibérica reunidas en los trabajos de Castroviejo et al. (1986-2012); y Valdés et al. (1987). Múltiples proyectos de Bioscripts convergen en este proyecto para darle más calidad y versatilidad, en u...

Este proyecto pretende aunar en una sola base de datos, toda la información existente sobre las especies silvestres de plantas Vasculares de la Península Ibérica reunidas en los trabajos de Castroviejo et al. (1986-2012); y Valdés et al. (1987). Múltiples proyectos de Bioscripts convergen en este proyecto para darle más calidad y versatilidad, en u...

Este proyecto pretende aunar en una sola base de datos, toda la información existente sobre las especies silvestres de plantas Vasculares de la Península Ibérica reunidas en los trabajos de Castroviejo et al. (1986-2012); y Valdés et al. (1987). Múltiples proyectos de Bioscripts convergen en este proyecto para darle más calidad y versatilidad, en u...

En este video se describe un caso práctico del uso de la plataforma web http://www.floravascular.com desde que se observa una planta en el campo, hasta que se determina la especie de la misma siguiendo la información taxonómica y las claves dicotómicas que se encuentran de acceso libre en la misma. En este caso, el recorrido por la clave dicotómica...

Este proyecto pretende aunar en una sola base de datos, toda la información existente sobre las especies silvestres de plantas Vasculares de la Península Ibérica reunidas en los trabajos de Castroviejo et al. (1986-2012); y Valdés et al. (1987). Múltiples proyectos de Bioscripts convergen en este proyecto para darle más calidad y versatilidad, en u...

Este proyecto pretende aunar en una sola base de datos, toda la información existente sobre las especies silvestres de plantas Vasculares de la Península Ibérica reunidas en los trabajos de Castroviejo et al. (1986-2012); y Valdés et al. (1987). Múltiples proyectos de Bioscripts convergen en este proyecto para darle más calidad y versatilidad, en u...

Cl-is a strange micronutrient since actual Cl-concentration in plants is about two orders of magnitude higher than the content required as essential micronutrient. This accumulation requires a high cost of energy, and since Cl-is a major osmotically active solute in the vacuole, we propose that Cl-plays a role in the regulation of water balance in...

Chloride (Cl-) is one of the 16 elements essential for plant growth. Because it is supposedly needed in small quantities for healthy growth of higher plants (<50-100 mM in the nutrient media), Cl- is considered a micronutrient (Johnson et al., 1957; Terry, 1977; Whitehead, 1985). Usually non-halophytic plants present critical deficiency contents be...

INTRODUCTION. Chloride (Cl-) is considered a micronutrient because it is supposed to be needed in a small quantity for a healthy growth in higher plants (<50-100 mM in the nutrient media, Johnson et al., 1957; Terry, 1977). However, Cl- is a strange micronutrient since actual Cl- concentration in plants is typical of the content of a macronutrient...

Chloride (Cl-) is one of the 16 elements essential for plant growth. Because it is supposed to be needed in small quantities for healthy growth of higher plants (<50-100 mM in the nutrient media), Cl- is considered a micronutrient (Johnson et al., 1957; Terry, 1977). Usually non-halophytic plants present critical deficiency contents below 0,2 mg/g...