Creating plants that make their own fertilizer
Monday, August 26, 2013 - 09:30
in Earth & Climate
Since the dawn of agriculture, people have exercised great ingenuity to pump more nitrogen into crop fields. Farmers have planted legumes and plowed the entire crop under, strewn night soil or manure on the fields, shipped in bat dung from islands in the Pacific or saltpeter from Chilean mines and plowed in glistening granules of synthetic fertilizer made in chemical plants. No wonder biologist Himadri Pakrasi's team is excited by the project they are undertaking. If they succeed, the chemical apparatus for nitrogen fixation will be miniaturized, automated and relocated within the plant so nitrogen is available when and where it is needed -- and only then and there.