Would you eat more corn if it used less fertilizer?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Half of the world is fed by crops grown with NITROGEN fertilizers! But the nitrogen that plants can’t use pollutes the environment! How do we cut back?
Enter Rafael Martinez-Feira and team from Pivot Bio. They used bacteria that naturally “FIXES” the air’s nitrogen into a form plants can use. They engineered the bacteria to work even in nitrogen-rich soil!
To “label” the affected nitrogen gas, researchers “marked” it with an extra atom.
And? The corn plants took in more nitrogen thanks to the engineered bacteria! Better yet, the bacteria helped corn yields stay high even with less fertilizer!
Now that’s what I call a-MAIZE-ing progress!
Reference: Martinez-Feria, R., Simmonds, M. B., Ozaydin, B., Lewis, S., Schwartz, A., Pluchino, A., McKellar, M., Gottlieb, S. S., Kayatsky, T., Vital, R., Mehlman, S. E., Caron, Z., Colaianni, N. R., Ané, J.-M., Maeda, J., Infante, V., Karlsson, B. H., McLimans, C., Vyn, T., … Temme, K. (2024). Genetic remodeling of soil diazotrophs enables partial replacement of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with biological nitrogen fixation in maize. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 27754. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-78243-3