Nitrogen is a critical limiting element for plant growth and production. It is a major component of chlorophyll, the most important pigment needed for photosynthesis, as well as amino acids, the key ...

When cover crops became a hot topic a few years ago, I tried to relabel them as “forage-covers” because they are multiuse ...

I was taken back a significant period of years by the article in C&EN on nitrogen fixation as a potential answer to the massive overuse of fertilizers (July 31, 2023, page 24). The underlying reasons ...

A new research initiative led by associate professor of bacteriology Betül Kaçar is positioned to transform agriculture and address some of the world’s most pressing ecological and economic challenges ...

UC Davis researchers engineered wheat that encourages soil bacteria to convert atmospheric nitrogen into plant-usable fertilizer. By boosting a natural compound in the plant, the wheat triggers ...

A typical day for Jieshun Lin began with a long bus ride to the greenhouses. “For 10 hours each day, I would pull up plants and wash their roots, looking carefully at each individual plant. [Up to] 10 ...

Nitrogen is vital for all known life. Yet most nitrogen on Earth is in the atmosphere as di-nitrogen gas, which many organisms can’t use. Fortunately, there are microbes that can tap into this ...

Nitrogen is essential for all life on Earth. In the global oceans, however, this element is scarce, and nitrogen availability is therefore critical for the growth of marine life. Some bacteria found ...

Most organisms require nitrogen to produce biological molecules, such as nucleotides and amino acids, but until recently, only prokaryotes were known to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. “It’s a very ...