16 ms·
A variety of corn has evolved a way to make its own nitrogen (2018)
- k2enemy 6y ago(2018)
- rezmason 6y agoWell, I'm sold.
- mkaic 6y agoVery exciting. As an outsider looking into the world of academic science, though, I am genuinely curious as to what about this paper took 13 years? The article mentions research by the team began in 2005, and only finished in 2018. Was it just the time needed to watch multiple generations of the corn grow? Anywho, fascinating stuff.
- rosstex 6y agoBut what about the nitrogen production industry? /s
- wollstonecraft 6y agoThis seems like it would lose an appreciable amount of water, but perhaps not nearly as much as transpiration. But in most places water is a cheaper input than nitrogen.
- mark-r 6y agoThe ads on this page drive me crazy. The text of the article jumps around like a rabbit on steroids.
- mcgt 6y agoThere's a better way to add nitrogen to soil and it's through the nitrogen cycle. The US Midwest (which grows a lot of corn) used to be highly populated with ruminants who did exactly this. We killed them all (well, most) and now grow corn which we use most to finish off cattle, which is also a ruminant. Maybe a better solution would be to feed the ruminants off the land now used by the corn? Imagine what that might do.
- mohaine 6y agoThis IS a nitrogen cycle. Sure it would be great to utilize waste nitrogen as well but that doesn't take away from this. Btw this is how lagumes fix nitrogen. This nothing new but since it is already in maze it can probably be crossbred into production corn lines without that toxic GMO label.
- mcgt 6y agoBacteria fix nitrogen, not legumes.
- adrianN 6y agoIt would make the ruminants meat more expensive. That's a hard sell politically.
- quixoticelixer- 6y agoHow do ruminants add nitrogen to the soil?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- function_seven 6y agoThey pee on it. http://fertsmart.dairyingfortomorrow.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Figure-12.1.png http://fertsmart.dairyingfortomorrow.com.au/wp-content/uploa... (Image hotlinked from https://fertsmart.dairyingfortomorrow.com.au/dairy-soils-and-fertiliser-manual/chapter-12-nitrogen-and-nitrogen-fertilisers/12-1-introduction/ https://fertsmart.dairyingfortomorrow.com.au/dairy-soils-and...)
- rmason 6y agoThis is an extremely hard problem. I've been following efforts to replace nitrogen for around forty years. It's part of a bigger trend of the seed industry grabbing a larger portion of the crop production dollar. It's the science of GMO's. We've replaced some insecticides by letting the plants produce their own. We've eliminated some herbicides (weed sprays) by producing resistance in the plant to first Roundup and later other herbicides. It's truly one of the scientific miracles of the past thirty years. Yet it has had strong opposition by the very people, organic advocates, that it benefits the most. This saddens me greatly. The very people who run around advocating 'listen to the scientists' on some issues, then selectively don't listen to them on others.
- mulmen 6y agoI find this post insightful generally but I don't think the last sentence was necessary. It is possible to be an organic advocate irrespective of "listening to the scientists" on this or any other topic. Constructing and attacking this straw man doesn't really add anything to your post.
- eloff 6y agoI think it's true though. The opposition to GMO foods is typically reflexive and unthinking. It's not grounded in logic or science. That's not to say throw all caution to the wind, but I've yet to hear anyone make a sound argument in this case. And there are at least good arguments to be made on both sides referencing the existing literature.
- ncmncm 6y agoYou don't really have any idea where opposition to GMO foods originates. You guess that it is reflexive and unthinking because that is convenient for you to guess. There are strong arguments against, not necessarily GMO as a technology, but practically all existing commercial uses of it. Furthermore, each use of it is potentially an independent problem with its own dangers. Thus far the only beneficial use of it I have heard of is "yellow rice", which is not actually available, for purely capitalistic reasons.
- henearkr 6y agoWith all this mucus dripping, won't it need even more water? Wouldn't that be a problem in the dry future?
- danielheath 6y agoCompared to the the problem of nitrogen fixing in a future without haber-bosch fertilizer plants, water use barely registers.
- quixoticelixer- 6y agoActually it does
- fouc 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised if the gel/mucus produced was water absorbent and most of the water used in the mucus actually came from external sources.
- tnjm 6y agoIt does. This landrace grows in areas receiving high rainfall, and with high ambient humidity -- and in my experience it only produces the mucus in those conditions, which sadly is likely to limit its potential, at least without very significant extra breeding work.
- fouc 6y agoI'm wondering if there are other plants with "Aerial root mucilage" also? The wikipedia page on aerial roots [0] needs some love. There's also another similar article about this corn [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_root [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/amaizeballs/567140/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/amaizeba...
- FriedPickles 6y agoWhy can’t plants make their own nitrogenase? Why do they need to outsource the nitrogen fixation to bacteria?
- ncmncm 6y agoThey never invented it for themselves. Attracting nitrogen-fixing bacteria turned out to be easier. Nature loves easier.
- rsynnott 6y agoI mean, why can't we live on sunlight, or purely on carbohydrates and trace elements? Organisms evolve for their environments; if something in your diet or the environment is producing enough of (whatever) for your needs, there's not much evolutionary pressure to produce it yourself. Or even keep the machinery for producing it in working order, if you have it. Vitamins are a good example, we need them, but we don't produce them (except for D, but there are practical problems producing that in the environments and latitudes in which humans now live).
- ncmncm 6y agoApparently it is not making nitrogen at all, but splitting aerial nitrogen and binding it into bigger molecules. Making nitrogen would be an impressive achievement for anybody, never mind a plant. Probably easiest is to make a lot of hydrocarbons with deuterium substituted for the regular hydrogen, and pack that around a source of free neutrons. The neutrons would lose energy to the deuteriums, and end up slow enough to be absorbed by the carbon nuclei, which would become nitrogen after a few steps. Also the deuterium would become tritium and then helium. Plants probably could concentrate deuterium. Where plants would get free neutrons is a poser; some plants will concentrate radionuclides from soil... But of course there's already plenty of nitrogen in the air.
- callesgg 6y agoDid you originally think we had found a variant of corn that was able to fuse or fission atoms? Haha, that would be something!
- ncmncm 6y agoThe title says it does. If it doesn't, the title is a lie.
- callesgg 6y agoNot understanding that things is not supposed to be taken literally is a common trait with autistic people.
- ncmncm 6y ago"Fix" is both shorter than "make", and correct. Literality has nothing to do with it. Obviously they meant "fix". It would have been equally easy to say "fix". Mistaking a riff on nucleosynthesis for not understanding that they were just being sloppy means some other thing.
- callesgg 6y ago
- londons_explore 6y agoThis would seem like a good candidate for regular old cross-breeding. People in the past would select which seeds and plants to cross breed by hand. You could imagine an automated system which could cross breed 1 billion (1e9) plants at once by using cameras and ML techniques looking for good traits on each plant, using just 3% of US farmland. It doesn't need perfection - a 10% error rate simply requires 10% more plants, so it's a perfect application of ML. The same plants you're using for breeding can still be producing sellable corn, so the cost of this selective breeding program on a per-plant basis is nearly zero.
- candiodari 6y agoThese days people are doing selective breeding by simply sequencing genes. It can produce the same results as transplanting genes in a matter of months for a lot of plants (because they don't use normal procreation). It's not cheaper or faster. And of course, now there's a massive debate whether this is GMO or not.
- amai 6y agoSo the plant basically does something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process ? That would be huge.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoI've skimmed this and will dig further (it's certainly interesting stuff) but one alternative needs considering is that it's there to attract animals which somehow leave nitrogen by other means - perhaps droppings? Or that eave offal? or are killed by other carnivores? Something else?