If plants can feel jealous, it will be for the beans. Beans have a super power. Or more accurately, they share one. They have developed symbiotic relationships with bacteria that process atmospheric nitrogen into a form that can be used by those plants — an element necessary for tissue building, photosynthesis, and in general. is to live healthy. This is called nitrogen fixation. If you look at the roots of legumes, you will see nodules provide these nitrogen-fixing microorganisms in the home and feed.
Other crops — grains like wheat, rice, and corn — don’t have such a profound symbiotic relationship, so farmers have to use large amounts of fertilizer to supply the nitrogen needed by the crops. This is very expensive. And fertilizer production is not good for the environment. It is not easy to turn atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen that plants can absorb on their own. “It takes a lot of energy and really high pressure and high temperature,” said plant biologist Angela Kent of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Bacteria do this at ambient temperature and pressure, so they’re pretty special. While energy is cheap, it is easy for us to overuse nitrogen fertilizers.”
Even worse, once it’s in the field, the fertilizer spews out nitrous oxide, which is 300 times stronger a greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide. Runoff from fields also contaminates water sources, leading to toxic algae blooms. This is a particularly bad problem in the Midwest, where fertilizer pours into the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, producing massive blooms each summer. When these algae die, they suck oxygen out of the water, killing any marine life unfortunately present in the area and creating infamous dead waters could grow to the size of New Jersey. Climate change only exacerbates the problem, since warmer waters hold less oxygen in the first place.
With all that in mind, scientists have long sought to reduce agriculture’s reliance on fertilizers by giving cereal crops their own nitrogen-fixing ability. And with the advancement of gene-editing technology over the past few decades, that task has been progressing. Last month, in Journal of Plant BiotechnologyResearchers describe A breakthrough with rice, plants design to produce more compounds that encourage biofilm growth, creating a cozy home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria, just like legumes provide nodules for their partner bacteria.
“For the past 30, 40 years, humans have been trying to make grains behave like grains,” said Eduardo Blumwald, a plant biologist at the University of California, Davis, who co-authored the new paper. bean. “Evolution in that sense is very cruel. You cannot do in the laboratory what has taken millions of years.”
So what happens to cruelty in evolution? Why do some plants — like, say aquatic fern– fix nitrogen while others can’t?
It’s not that other species don’t get nitrogen at all. Cereal grasses use nitrogen already in the soil — it comes from animal manure, as well as whole life stir in the soil. (Many different groups of bacteria process atmospheric nitrogen, not just legume symbionts.)
