Creating plants that make their own fertilizer

Washington University biologists are undertaking an ambitious project to engineer tiny nitrogen-fixing devices within photosynthetic cells.

James Byard/WUSTL

Nancy Duan (left), Michelle Liberton and Lingxia Zhao are members of Himadri Pakrasi’s team, which has taken the first proof-of-principle steps toward inserting the genes needed to fix nitrogen — otherwise found only in bacteria and the bacteria-like Archae — into the cells of crop plants.

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.

“That would really revolutionize agriculture,” said Pakrasi, PhD, the Myron and Sonya Glassberg/Albert and Blanche Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences and director of the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) at Washington University in St. Louis.

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