An engineered barley plant that ‘orders’ soil bacteria to manufacture fertiliser

https://www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/news/engineered-barley-plant-orders-soil-bacteria-manufacture-ammonia-fertiliser

by montalbano • 4 years ago

174 114 4 years ago

slcu.cam.ac.uk

credit_guy2• 4 years ago

If you are against fertilisers, chances are you are against GMO as well.

eloff• 4 years ago

I think the biggest objections to fertilizers are environmental? It's not like pesticides where people worry about residue on their food? They may not be overlapping then.

neltnerb• 4 years ago

Fertilizer overuse causing runoff is half the concern, that part causes algae blooms.

On the other half is that fertilizers are either mined (unlikely) or manufactured from nitrogen in the air plus hydrogen. The downside is that the hydrogen is almost entirely made from natural gas.

So, fertilizers start as mostly fossil fuel energetically, and end up feeding algae blooms if overused. This seems like a huge deal to me, I've been keeping an eye on this kind of project for a long time. Reducing use of fertilizer means less fossil fuel use, and if it's generated locally and in the right amounts it is bound to help on the waste side too.

bell-cot2• 4 years ago

IIR, there's quite a bit of opposition to large-scale, commercial agricultural fertilizers that is based on "the poor farmers often end up in debt bondage" arguments.

(A line of reasoning which could also be applied to GMO's where the underlying IP is controlled by big, greedy corporations.)

pkaye2• 4 years ago

Farmers can always use organic fertilizers if they want.

christophilus2• 4 years ago

My main problem with GMO is that it usually means: loads of pesticides and abuse of monopolistic powers, especially in poorer countries.

ch4s310• 4 years ago

In practice it seems like capital intensive large scale mono-cropping does most of that without GMOs needing to make an appearance. Careful application of GMOs could probably cut the need for fertilizers and pesticides.

Figuring out how to maintain some food production capacity without debt peonage in developing countries is a policy problem more than a technical problem.

drewmol3• 4 years ago

Slight correction, it leads to loads of herbicide usage (glyphosate). The process of desiccation also leads to loads of glyphosate being used just prior to harvest, on non ‘Roundup Ready’ (glyphosate resistant) crops, which may be worse as it doesn’t get rinsed off since it’s used in the drying phase. See: https://ensia.com/features/glyphosate-drying/

spaetzleesser3• 4 years ago

I remember all the PR about GMO that told us that GMO makes plants resistant against pests so pesticides would be less necessary. Turns out the main use for GMO was to make the plants more resistant against herbicides so even more could be used. Very disappointing and a very cynical campaign by industry.

I guess the same happened with the push for plastics recycling by industry which also turned out be pure deception.

rmason2• 4 years ago

You have that completely wrong. GMO's ushered in reduced pesticide use and the pesticides that are used are safer. I say this as a fertilizer company agronomist that was working when GMO's appeared. The amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around GMO's is high.

credit_guy2• 4 years ago

If that’s the problem, then ban or regulate pesticides. Instead, the EU bans GMOs themselves.

striking• 4 years ago

There's a synthetic fertilizer shortage right now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-01/farmers-a...

Melatonic• 4 years ago

Most people are against the current *implementation* of GMO. Hopefully as the process gets easier and cheaper we will get more options

delecti• 4 years ago

I think we should use less fertilizer because most of it is made from petroleum we should be leaving in the ground. I think GMOs that let us use less fertilizer is awesome.

ajmurmann• 4 years ago

Could this even result in (temporary?) carbon capture?

paulkrush2• 4 years ago

You can write a 1000 year plan with GMO. Try that with mined fertilisers.

aaron695• 4 years ago

The only people who think you can accurately plan more than 50 years ahead are environmentalists and economists in the heads of environmentalists.

But if we got everyone to first world conditions we still could be using mined fertilisers in 1000 years, along with using fossil fuels to run the planet in a fine utopia.

Of course I and a lot of others want to be visiting space in decades. Along with the population will start to explode again in decades. And lots of other things like traveling to the nearest star within 1000 years would take a lot of fossil fuel using current tech.

1000 years is a pointless thing to think about.

vosper• 4 years ago

I disagree that it's not worth thinking about the next 1,000 years, but I think you're right that right now we can't realistically plan more than 50 years ahead.

(I vouched for your comment)

dv_dt• 4 years ago

I think you could make a plan with renewable energy produced fertilizers.

nielsbot• 4 years ago

There are more problems with fertilizer than CO2 emissions.

Andys2• 4 years ago

are we able to do away with phosphorus?

paulkrush2• 4 years ago

That’s a really good point. The article was talking about nitrogen and I conflated this with phosphorus and potassium with my “mined fertilizers” comment.

blingscramble• 4 years ago

Absolutely. There are plenty of naturally occurring beneficial microbes currently being applied/utilized in US Ag to accomplish this. P is different than fixed N as the P is currently in a plant unavailable form in the root zone ie soil. Microbes solubilize thru enzymatic processes this unavailable P into a plant available form. With decades of MAP/DAP application and/or manure there is an abundance of locked up P in the soil and beneficial microbes hold an immediately accessible set of keys!

worik• 4 years ago

You can write a 1000 year plan with GMO. Try that with mined fertilisers. Been doing agriculture for >10,000 years without either

JadeNB2• 4 years ago

> You can write a 1000 year plan with GMO. Try that with mined fertilisers.
Been doing agriculture for >10,000 years without either.

Not necessarily endorsing the GP's point of view, but most of that 10,000 years was spent with much smaller populations ingesting much fewer calories per capita.

svieira• 4 years ago

Scientists have accomplished a key step in the long-term ambition to engineer nitrogen-fixation into non-legume cereal crops by demonstrating that barley can instruct soil bacteria to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia fertiliser.

E. g. make non-legumes act like legumes. The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119

mrpopo2• 4 years ago

Farmers have practiced crop rotation for nitrogen fixing for millenia, among many other benefits : less favorable conditions for weeds and pests due to changing conditions, diversification of nutrients, improved soil structure which in turn improves carbon sequestration, ...

Legumes also provide amino-acids that are lacking in cereals, which makes a legume-cereal combination a healthy well-balanced diet.

Crop rotation doesn't prevent mechanization or reduce farm productivity in any way, rather the opposite because it improves soil health.

So, my question: what is the benefit of this? Would that further improve yield in combination with crop rotation?

ch4s310• 4 years ago

There are places where the weather permits 2 harvests per year, and if you could do that without rotation, and without added nitrogen then you could produce as much or more barley on less land. Or rotate between this GMO, barley, and soy while still building up nitrogen.

While crop rotation has its place, it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago.

flobosg3• 4 years ago

The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119

Paywalled, unfortunately, but a previous similar study by the senior author can be found at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10882-x

infogulch• 4 years ago

These just-in-time manufacturing techniques are getting ridiculous.

epa• 4 years ago

People easily forget that crypto is still in beta/early version, we are in javascript 1.0 mode.

topher_t• 4 years ago

I'm a little worried that having plants sending signals to soil bacteria to produce ammonia without releasing the associated sugars and nutrients that legumes do, might put evolutionary pressure on those soil bacteria to stop reacting to those signals, potentially harming legume crops if that non-reactive soil bacteria proliferates.

melissalobos• 4 years ago

That actually sounds very frightening, can anyone comment on how possible that would be?

matheusmoreira• 4 years ago

It makes sense. Same thing happens with antibiotic resistance, for example. It costs them energy and nutrients to develop and maintain resistance capabilities. Previously resistant bacteria may become sensitive again if exposure to the antibiotic ceases. The logic is they will be wasting energy duplicating and expressing useless DNA and proteins whose only purpose is dealing with antibiotics that are no longer present, so getting rid of them increases fitness because it frees up resources for other purposes.

Bacteria evolve frighteningly quickly.

JadeNB2• 4 years ago

In terms of possibility: some adaptations, whether these or others that we can't predict, will occur eventually; evolution doesn't stop.

In terms of how long it'll take: evolution is slow in terms of number of generations per organism, but it's relentless. The more widely any modification is deployed, the more interactions there are, and the quicker in terms of time some adaptation will occur; and, once an advantageous adaptation does occur in one place, seed dispersal will allow it to spread quickly.

As an example that I single out because I read about it recently in the delightful "Lives of weeds" by Cardina (https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759000/live...), the adaptations of plants to deal with the "irresistible" Round-Up pesticide are highly improbable, but there were trillions of chances, and so it didn't take long for them to develop; and, once developed, they spread very quickly.

sjg0077• 4 years ago

How do you know they don’t? The bacteria will die if they don’t get what they need to live.

flobosg3• 4 years ago

I’m not sure if I’m following you correctly. If a non-reactive strain is evolved, by definition it will be unable to establish itself in the plant nodules, and that niche will still be occupied by reactive, symbiosis-capable bacteria. Besides, the signal for ammonia production, rhizopine, is actually a sugar-like compound.

foerbert• 4 years ago

I don't think you can just "by definition" reality like that. Sure, the non-reactive strain won't be called a symbiotic partner, by definition. But that doesn't poof the bacteria out of existence.

That said, I think you're correct about not being so concerned. If the symbiotic relationship was so exploitable, it'd probably be a great evolutionary advantage to do so. The signal being a sugar itself, as you note, doesn't surprise me.

passivate• 4 years ago

I do wonder at which point does modern agriculture stop being natural? We killed micro-ecologies from vast areas of land, removed wild plants/rodents and other so-called "pests" and forced large scale growing of plants in various ways - selective breeding and process optimization to boost yields, etc. Do we call all that natural and draw the line at GMO?

kadoban• 4 years ago

I do wonder at which point does modern agriculture stop being natural?

A point decades ago, at _least_. More likely centuries or millenia, depending on your definition.

lootsauce2• 4 years ago

I have recently discovered Greg Judy on YT and have become fascinated with the possibilities of regenerative agriculture with grazing. He is producing organically with almost no inputs, no heavy equipment and it is growing better soil. Pretty impressive when you compare how many inputs are required with other methods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPmYlRMuXo8

whalesalad• 4 years ago

This is the way. We need to go back to the way our ancestors did things. Factory farming will kill us eventually.

ch4s310• 4 years ago

Our agrarian ancestors were highly food insecure, and often died in droves if a few harvests failed in a row they also achieved this feat with more land per person under cultivation. Factory farming ins't ideal, but it feeds far more people on far less land. We should improve our methods, take soil health into account, and conserve water and other resources but there's a baby in that bath water.

Land under cultivation in 1970 in the US was 464 million acres and is now about 384 million acres and production has nearly doubled. A lot of that 80 million acres has been re-wilded. We now have more tree cover than we have had for more than a century.

idiotsecant• 4 years ago

factory farming will kill us eventually. Not factory farming will kill us in 90 days, on average, since that's how much food storage we have as a species.

MisterMower• 4 years ago

Yeah, speak for yourself. Foraging for berries and trying not to get mauled by a moose or bear? In case you weren’t aware, that’s how our ancestors did things.

Factory farming is the only reason your great grand parents survived childhood. It’s what allowed your parents to be born and live long enough to raise you.

An argument can be made that the internet and this website only exist because some really smart people weren’t worried about their next next meal every day and devoted their talents to making innovative technologies instead of foraging for food.

The most charitable word I can use to describe this comment is ignorant.

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

The thing about food production is that intensive fertilizer use allows double-cropping (two+ harvests per year in one field, like corn-soy). Brazil uses this a lot. So if you switch to lower input 'regenerative' processes, you'll only get one harvest per year most likely. This means Brazil might stop exporting food, and a lot of countries rely heavily on those exports.

https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/article/?a=94

Becoming reliant on such intensive farming practices was a mistake, but here we are.

lootsauce2• 4 years ago

A lot of that grain is fed to cattle, what is interesting is that here is a way to raise cattle with almost no inputs and certainly no feeding of grains.

krageon2• 4 years ago

Making a mistake and becoming reliant on it doesn't mean you can't ever stop, but it does mean you need to change.

Terry_Roll• 4 years ago

There is a stat going around which states that !if everyone went vegetarian we could free up 80% of the farm land", yet with comments like double cropping per year which we see in the UK that 80% figure should actually be a lot lower especially if fallow time was factored in.

So if fallow time was factored in, in reality we have probably already run out of farm land to grow livestock and are at or just exceeding the available farmland to grow nutritional crops!

It makes the MIT population collapse model prediction for a global collapse in society by 2040 seem more believable when looking at the lack of farmland this planet has to grow decent nutritional crops.

appleflaxen• 4 years ago

Wow! Awesome video! Thanks for the link!

An engineered barley plant that ‘orders’ soil bacteria to manufacture fertiliser

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