Researchers receive $3.87 million from NSF to study nitrogen fixation

Four teams are using synthetic biology to create new components for plants: a global search for a mysterious lost bacterium with significant unique functions; work to engineer beneficial relationships between plants and microbes; and an effort to mimic strategies employed by blue-green algae.

 

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.K.'s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) made the awards following an 'Ideas Lab' that focused on new approaches for dealing with the challenges of nitrogen in the growing global food demand. 

 

Plants need nitrogen to grow, and by 2015, more than 190.4 million tons of it will be needed to supply the world's food. Most farms rely on great quantities of industrially-produced, nitrogen-rich fertilizer to ensure crop yields, but doing so comes with trade-offs.

 

Artificial fertilizers are costly and are produced using vast amounts of fossil fuel. They also generate environmental problems from degrading soil to runoff into rivers where they pollute fresh waters and coastal zones. As a result, crops need an alternative from which they can gather needed nitrogen.

 

According to researchers, there is plenty of environmentally-safe nitrogen in the atmosphere, but it is unusable. Atmospheric nitrogen needs to be 'fixed', they say, meaning it needs to be converted into a form that plants can use.

 

The programs offer technological stepping stones to do just that--reduce the need for artificial fertilizers by enabling crops to fix their own nitrogen.

 

The four Ideas Lab projects are:

 

Himadri B. Pakrasi, Tae Seok Moon and Fuzhong Zhang, Washington University in St. Louis; Costas D. Maranas, Penn State University;

 

The goal of this NSF-sponsored project is to develop the design principles to establish nitrogen fixing ability in an oxygenic photosynthetic organism, unicellular cyanobacterium. Cyanobacteria are blue-green algae of which certain strains are capable of gathering and converting atmospheric nitrogen.

 

Researchers led by Washington University in St. Louis biologist Himadri B. Pakrasi will attempt to use the ingenious strategies employed by the cyanobacterium to define the minimum requirements for nitrogen fixation to occur in photosynthetic cells, including those in crop plants. The researchers will also attempt to engineer plant cells with the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen into usable compounds.

 

Read more at science20.com.