Slashdot Mirror
Nitrogen Fixing Bacteria That Can Colonize Most Plants Discovered
Zothecula writes "Synthetic crop fertilizers are a huge source of pollution. This is particularly true when they're washed from fields (or leach out of them) and enter our waterways. Unfortunately, most commercial crops need the fertilizer, because it provides the nitrogen that they require to survive. Now, however, a scientist at the University of Nottingham has developed what he claims is an environmentally-friendly process, that allows virtually any type of plant to obtain naturally-occurring nitrogen directly from the atmosphere."
The process involves injecting a bacteria that colonizes the plant and fixes atmospheric nitrogen in exchange for a bit of sugar, similar to soybeans. Only this bacteria will readily colonize most any plant.
Animals are now obsolete. The plants can kill us off now, watch our for your cucumbers and geraniums.
Let me read TFA... Azotic Technologies.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
Massive let down when I realized it wasn't a breakthrough in terraforming! :((((
Seriously? What's wrong with using nitrogen fixing plants to fill the soil with nitrogen? Yeah .. it's much more fun to engineer your own plant effects but it can have unknown side effects. If you're going to try to get rid of artificial fertilizers, shouldn't you be ensuring that your solution is sustainable? Creating and distributing large quantities of bacteria with unknown long term effects is not a known quantity and hence .. is not a sustainable solution.
May as well keep spraying artificial fertilizers, at least we know how that degrades the soil.
Plants need phosphorous almost as much as they need nitrogen. Currently, we're using mined sources of phosphorous as fertilizer--and there is a finite supply of really good phosphorous sources.
Potassium (the third major plant nutrient) we can extract from seawater without any problems, but the seawater concentration of phosphorous is much lower.
So what do we do about phosphorous?
--PeterM
Hardly -- you're overestimating the role of land plants in the ecosystem. Most nitrogen fixation is done by cyanobacteria in the oceans.
Also, nitrogen fixation hasn't led to a depletion of nitrogen in the atmosphere, because there are whole families of denitrifying bacteria that make a living reducing nitrate back to N2 (a process which is much easier than going the other way).
If the claims are true (60% of a plant's nitrogen requirements, adaptable to most crops), this is absolutely huge. All the research on how legumes manage their symbiotic organisms seemed to point to a long, hard slog in adapting nitrogen fixation to other crops, and now here it is from a naturally occurring organism.
But before I break out the champagne, I'm going to ask whereisthefuckingpaper?
Let me know if they ever figure out how to apply this bacteria to seed before planting or spraying after sprouting. Then they'll have something worth talking about.
Er, that's exactly what is disussed in TFA:
"The process that Cocking developed, based on his discovery, is known as N-Fix. It involves covering seeds in a non-toxic coating that contains the bacterium. As a seed sprouts and the plant grows, the bacterium enters through its roots, and ultimately ends up in every cell of the plant. This means that every one of those cells is capable of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere – just like sugarcane does."
There are only four known objects with nitrogen atmospheres: Earth (already terraformed by microbes), Titan (surface temperature -220 C), Triton and Pluto (surface pressure ~10 microbars). The only two terraforming targets are Mars and (at a stretch) Venus, both of which have almost zero nitrogen in their atmospheres.
This is either a critical research failure, or hyping up a somewhat boring discovery to a more exciting one, or both.
What if this thing gets out of hand and plants start to become larger as they are fed more nitrogen. We could become overrun with weed type plants that we can't control. Almost everything has unintended consequences. From the laws made in Congress to the modification of plants.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
GMO, Devil, Evil, Bad, KILLING HUMANITY!!! Organic Only!!!!!!!!
Oh, but this was discovered in Europe, or at least England, so its ok. No problem.
Unless or until its licensed exclusively by Monsanto, then, EVIL AGAIN!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Oh god, we already are! (It's called grass.)
A little more seriously, they're doing field trials now, so we'll probably know soon enough.
As far as I can tell, the process is clumsy enough (the seeds have to be pre-impregnated in the lab with the bacteria) that this is a rather small risk.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Ammonia is the second only to petrochemical production and 83% goes to fertilizer. If the bacteria can replace most requirements for nitrogen fertilizer this will drastically reduce reliance on energy for agriculture, especially the reducing natural gas that is converted to hydrogen to make Ammonia
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Currently about three billion pounds of KNO3 are made each year. Suppose the researcher's hopes come true and that is cut in half. That would mean only 1,500,000,000 pounds would be on the market each year. Of course, it's not just used for fertilizer, there are many other uses. But if you did replace all those other uses, there would only be enough KNO3 to make ten million bombs per year. Of course, horse stables are full of it, too - stale urine is potassium nitrate.
You know why you can't take liquids on airplanes? Hydrogen peroxide and nail polish remover. If you mix the two correctly, you get a VERY powerful explosive . (If you mix them incorrectly you get dead. Don't try it. It's a great explosive for SUICIDE bombers.)
Another frequently used and powerful explosive is aluminium powder. Yep, ground up tinfoil. Don't try that at home either, it might blow up while you're grinding it. Adding Parlon can help. Parlon is also known as Saran Wrap.
Grind up ping pong balls, that modern gunpowder, called smokeless powder.
So you see, to make any progress by banning stuff you would need to ban half the stuff in the grocery store. Oh, and don't forget to ban livestock, so everyone would have to be vegetarian. ( remember, where animals piss, potassium nitrate crystallizes.)
This is a key part of permaculture, using plants that establish such relationships to build soil mass. Members of the legume family, peas and beans, already do this. So do trees like Russian Olive. These plants are capable of demonstrating "weedy" like behavior in that they can land in places that have nothing, establish a toe hold and grow and build soil as they die over generations. So, if you're an environmentalist who is horrified that "icky algae" is being displaced by something new, you might hate these types of plants, but really, they are pioneering plants that build fertility. I spent a lot of time researching what types of plants with these characteristics would grow in my local area because I'm interested in building a "Food Forest". Look up some of Geoff Lawton's videos on the subject, it's fascinating stuff.
The idea that something like this is a threat is kind of laughable. It would be an incredible boon. People are already purchasing bacteria and rubbing it into their seeds to give them a good start, but the bacteria only form the necessary symbiotic relationship on a small selection of plants.
I'll be sharing this with some of the folks at the local community farm I'm involved with who know more about the subject than I and see what they make of it, that's for sure...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
No problem, we'll just dock the stings and then sit back to watch the free light show in the sky.
Did it just get dark in here?