If crops might really feel envy, it’d be for legumes. Bean vegetation have a superpower. Or extra precisely, they share one. They’ve developed symbiotic relationships with micro organism that course of atmospheric nitrogen right into a kind that’s usable for these vegetation—a vital ingredient for constructing their tissues, photosynthesizing, and customarily staying wholesome. This is named nitrogen fixation. When you have a look at a legume’s roots, you’ll see nodules that present these nitrogen-fixing microbes with a house and meals. 

Different crops—cereals like wheat, rice, and corn—don’t have such a deep symbiotic relationship, so farmers have to make use of giant quantities of fertilizer to get the vegetation the nitrogen they want. That is very costly. And fertilizer manufacturing just isn’t nice for the atmosphere. It’s not simple to show atmospheric nitrogen right into a type of nitrogen that vegetation can take in on their very own. “It takes lots of vitality and actually excessive pressures and excessive temperatures,” says College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plant biologist Angela Kent. “Micro organism do that at ambient temperatures and pressures, so that they’re fairly particular. Whereas vitality has been low cost, it’s been simple for us to overuse nitrogen fertilizers.” 

Even worse, as soon as it’s on fields, fertilizer spews nitrous oxide, which is 300 occasions as potent a greenhouse gasoline as carbon dioxide. Runoff from fields additionally pollutes water our bodies, resulting in poisonous algal blooms. It is a significantly unhealthy downside within the Midwest, the place fertilizer empties into the Mississippi River and flows into the Gulf of Mexico, fueling large blooms each summer season. When these algae die, they suck the oxygen out of the water, killing any sea creatures unlucky sufficient to be within the space and making a infamous aquatic useless zone that may develop to be the scale of New Jersey. Local weather change is simply exacerbating the issue, since hotter waters maintain much less oxygen to start with. 

Given all that nastiness, scientists have lengthy been on a quest to scale back agriculture’s dependence on fertilizers by giving cereal crops their very own nitrogen-fixing powers. And with the rise of gene-editing know-how over the previous few a long time, that quest has been making progress. Final month, within the Plant Biotechnology Journal, researchers described a breakthrough with rice, engineering the plant to provide extra compounds that encourage the expansion of biofilms, which offer a comfortable house for nitrogen-fixing micro organism, very like legumes present nodules for his or her companion microbes.  

“Folks for the final 30, 40 years have been making an attempt to make cereals behave like legumes,” says Eduardo Blumwald, a plant biologist on the College of California, Davis who coauthored the brand new paper. “Evolution in that sense may be very merciless. You can not do within the lab what took thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years.”

So what’s with the evolutionary cruelty? Why can some vegetation—like, say aquatic ferns—repair nitrogen whereas others can’t? 

It’s not that different species don’t get nitrogen in any respect. Cereal grasses use nitrogen that’s already within the soil—it comes from animal manure, in addition to all of the life churning within the dust. (A lot of totally different bacterial teams course of atmospheric nitrogen, not simply the legumes’ symbionts.)