
Technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air - Shivetya
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2013/july/world-changing-technology-enables-crops-to-take-nitrogen-from-the-air-.aspx
======
Blahah
This could be a world-changer if managed properly. I therefore think it's a
great shame to see this being commercially licensed. The research was at least
partly charitably funded: Cocking has had Leverhulme Trust money
([http://link.springer.com/article/10.1079%2FIVP2005716](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1079%2FIVP2005716)).
I find it remarkable that he's pursuing a for-profit commercialisation.

Others have commented about the 'strong evolutionary advantage' this will
convey crop species. I think that unlikely: a large number of species in the
Fabaceae family (legumes) have the ability to form symbioses with nitrogen-
fixing bacteria, and this simply allows them to exist on nutrient poor soil.
But because it's a symbiosis, i.e. the plant trades some of the sugar it
produces for the nitrate fixed by the bacteria, it's not a cost-free
situation. Legumes don't dominate many habitats, but they do OK in very
nutrient poor soils.

Modern crops don't perform well outside intensively nurtured field conditions.
N-fixed crops will require less intensive nitrogen supplementation than
before, but they will still perform poorly when competing against wild plants.

~~~
neltnerb
Agreed. I've studied the impact of fertilizers on natural gas consumption, and
the figures are stunning. If we were able to reduce fertilizer use by just 1%,
we would save meaningful amounts of energy. If we could eliminate it entirely,
it would be as big of a breakthrough as the green revolution.

It is a shame about the for-profit commercialization, but I think it's worth
remembering that such things do sometimes result in faster implementation
because the people working on it have more skin in the game. But either way,
it will be public domain in 17 years worst case. I don't think that amount of
time will make or break agriculture, and if you need 100% less fertilizer it's
a pretty easy economic case.

~~~
mhurron
You'd reduce fertilizer usage if you could prevent farmers from over-
fertilizing. Simply following directions would be a huge step forward.
Unfortunately there isn't a technical fix for stupid.

There is more to fertilizer than just Nitrogen compounds so you would still
need a fertilizer, it just wouldn't need to be as nitrogen rich. And the
farmers will continue to over fertilize.

~~~
DamnYuppie
Where do you get the idea that they are over fertilizing? The vast majority of
them are on slim margins and watch everything like a hawk so I find it
unlikely, given the costs, and their equipment that they are rampantly over
fertilizing.

~~~
pinneycolton
Not to mention the fact that over fertilizing will often _reduce_ crop yields.
The idea that the runoff of fertilizer products into groundwater, streams,
lakes and oceans must be the result of over fertilization is false. It's the
result of gravity.

------
smackay
Perhaps Professor Cocking should have read James Lovelock's "Gaia: A new look
at life on earth" first.

"The day came for the tropical trial at the field station in Northern
Queensland. A culture of P. eegarii was without ceremony sprayed in diluted
form upon a small patch of experimental rice paddy. But here the bacterium
forsook its contrived marriage with the cereal plants {40} and formed a more
exciting but adulterous union with a tough and self-sufficient blue-green alga
growing on the water surface of the paddy field. They grew happily together,
doubling in numbers every twenty minutes in the warm tropical environment, the
air and soil providing all they needed. Small predatory organisms would
normally have ensured a check on such a development, but this combination was
not to be stopped. Its capacity to gather phosphorus rendered the environment
barren for everything else.

Within hours, the rice paddy and those around it took on the appearance of a
ripe duck pond covered with lurid iridescent green scum. It was realized that
something had gone badly wrong and the scientists soon uncovered the
association of P. eegarii and the alga. Foreseeing the dangers with rare
promptness, they arranged that the entire paddy area and the water channels
leading from it be treated with a biocide and the growth destroyed.

That night, Dr Eeger and his Australian colleagues went late to bed, tired and
worried. The dawn fulfilled their worst fears. The new bloom, like some living
verdigris, covered the surface of a small stream a mile away from the paddies
and only a few miles from the sea. Again, every agent of destruction was
applied wherever the new organism might have travelled. The director of the
Queensland station tried desperately but in vain to persuade the government to
evacuate the area at once and use a hydrogen bomb to sterilize it before the
spread was beyond all possibility of control.

In two days the algal bloom had started to spread into the coastal waters, and
by then it was too late. Within a week the green stain was clearly visible to
airline passengers flying six miles above the Gulf of Carpentaria. Within six
months more than half of the ocean and most of the land surfaces were covered
with a thick green slime which fed voraciously on the dead trees and animal
life decaying beneath it."

EDIT: Added full title of the book.

~~~
VLM
Using blue-green algae was a bad decision in the fictional design. Its really
old. There seems to be something of a "law" that if its technically possible,
evolution, given enough time, will evolve it. Since it hasn't happened
naturally in billions of years, its not going to work artificially because it
surely already happened at least a couple times and didn't work in the long
run.

Now pick a species thats "new" like humans, and give us something weird like
direct atmospheric nitrogen fixing for our proteins, or photosynthesis, now
that could have some interesting consequences. Or instead of us, horses, or
mules, or domestic dogs or something.

~~~
Blahah
There are good reasons why evolution will never converge on many types of
solutions to problems in many lineages in planetary lifetime timescales.
Essentially, it's because future evolution is constrained by past evolution,
and many complex solutions require diverse pre-adaptations that are precluded
by accident. These are places where engineering beats evolution, and there's
scope for us to make improvements on what nature has achieved.

Surface area to volume ratio of humans and other animals is way too small to
allow anything interesting to come of us photosynthesising (e.g. see [1] for
crude calculations). Although a healthy green glow would be nice.

[1] -
[http://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosynthe...](http://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosyntheti-
people/)

~~~
VLM
The writeup is pretty good, but I read an much older writeup which diverged in
some ways:

1) The assumptions from the article I read long ago were you'd ideally have a
topical UV sunscreen that magically gradually "infected" the skin, which wipes
out both the UV problem and the application problem, and it would be cheap
enough to distribute to war refugees, starving famine farmers, hurricane
areas, that kind of thing. Temporary emergency rather than lifetime green
glow. So depending on your math, laying around in the sun would only generate
a couple apples worth of energy for a person. Not impressive for a hungry dude
in Wisconsin in 2013, but a handful of apples is actually a pretty good day
for someone in (insert every war torn drought famine area throughout the ages)

2) The article I read a long time ago was of a vintage where the jokes would
revolve around Federation Starship Captain Kirk's paradise would be nude beach
of skinny green skinned Orion women rather than Bruce Banner jokes.

3) There would be interesting sociological issues where if this was solely
applied to poor people, their verdant green skin would be a nearly 100%
effective way to discriminate for socioeconomic class based on skin color.

~~~
Blahah
Exploring the social implications would make a pretty interesting sci-fi
novel.

------
lifeisstillgood
This is deeply enormous - if it can make the leap from lab to field. Nitrogen
fixing in factories costs something like 5% of global energy, the run off is
horrific and delivery spotty. There are a lot of hurdles first though.

The one thing that worries me, is years back Dubbya said something like "I'm
not worried about global warming, those scientists will invent something". I
laughed at the feeble excuse to avoid Kyoto - but now ... Bush may have been
right.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
> ... Bush may have been right.

I saw the attitude had two parts - "We will soon invent a technical solution"
_and_ "so, we don't need to alter our behaviour"

The first part seems to be true -surprisingly.

The second part, might also be true. That worries me. If the whole planet
altered its behaviour slightly to become vegan, most energy, water and
agricultural crises will vanish. Instead we invent lab-grown beef.

Economics seems to be the science of individual behaviour and crowd behaviour.
Every long lived and successful person or company seems to recognise
moderating ones own behaviour leads to more sensible restrained wants and
needs. Franklin might be a good example.

I guess I am saying I worry that technology is enabling in the co-dependence
sense of the word, humanities worst excesses - and that it is feasible for
politicians to support that.

~~~
freehunter
The whole world becoming vegan would not be a slight behavior modification.
That would be a huge shift in the behaviors we evolved to have, which is the
eating of both meat and plants. The reason people like eating meat is because
we evolved to find meat delicious.

~~~
foobarbazqux
I'd say we evolved to find just about any source of protein delicious, simply
because we need protein and finding it delicious confers a selection
advantage. Meat is one such source. So we didn't really evolve to eat meat and
plants (and mushrooms), we evolved to eat whatever was available.

~~~
freehunter
True. We evolved to find protein tasty, and we evolved the ability (digestive
system and teeth) to eat meat as one protein source.

~~~
foobarbazqux
I searched a little and apparently the evolution of a specific ability to eat
meat is something that people fight about:

[http://paleohacks.com/questions/56542/humans-werent-
designed...](http://paleohacks.com/questions/56542/humans-werent-designed-to-
eat-meat)

I'm not sure it's even possible to have a reasonable discussion about it
because it seems tied up with the question of whether veganism is righteous or
idiotic.

------
BetaCygni
My fathers(!) PhD thesis was about this (in peas). Not much has happened since
then. Nitrogen based fertilizer is inexpensive enough and famine is usually
caused by war or other instability.

~~~
Blahah
This process happens naturally in peas, in small nodules which grow out from
the roots. A huge amount has happened since 'then' (assuming your father did
his PhD prior to about 1990. We can now induce many major crop species which
_don 't naturally enter into symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria_ to do so
_in every cell_ , not just in accessory root nodules. This is huge.

~~~
BetaCygni
Yes, it is very interesting but I don't think it will be "world changing".

~~~
Blahah
Why do you think it won't? To respond to the brief points you made in the
earlier comment:

At the moment inorganic nitrogenous fertilizers are cheap. They are derived
from the methane in natural gas by the Haber-Bosch process, so the price of
fertilizers is tied to natural gas supply. Estimates vary, but we probably
only have about 60 years of natural gas supply left when you factor in the
increasing use and near-peak production (according to the 2013 International
Energy Outlook [1]). And the extraction methods are becoming more
environmentally challenging: fracking and shale gas are the natural gas
sources of the future. The food-price effects of that will be felt as soon as
we pass peak gas production. So we need a new way of fixing nitrogen in the
near future.

Secondly, while much famine is caused by war, there are many other causes, and
hunger is more widespread than famine. Increasing world population, especially
in poorer areas, and a complete failure to make any progress so far in fixing
the inequality-related causes of hunger mean technological crop solutions are
likely to be important in feeding the future population.

[1]:
[http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/index.cfm](http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/index.cfm)

~~~
BetaCygni
I think it won't change the world because technical solutions rarely solve
political problems. Call me a cynic if you wish.

~~~
penguindev
Technology hasn't stopped hunger, the claims of mad scientists
notwithstanding. Anyone with right brain critical thinking can see that
population will just keep increasing, and it has. Even if you 'solved hunger'
you'd have even more environmental problems to solve. There is such a thing as
a 'pyrrhic scientific victory', I think. Too many discoveries like these and
the planet will be done for.

So now we have an invention that will deplete one resource instead of another.
Awesome, go science!

~~~
Blahah
While it hasn't _stopped_ hunger, it certainly has reduced it. The Green
Revolution was the reason for nearly a billion people being lifted out of
abject malnutrition. It was a technological revolution brought about by the
application of science to agriculture.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution)

Go science!

------
dnautics
[reposting my comment from a lower level]

"Traditional" nitrogen fixing bacteria make their way to specialized nodules.
Basically this is because the nitrogenase enzyme is incredibly oxygen-
sensitive, and it's quite difficult to shield the interior of the enzyme
selectively against oxygen (oxygen and nitrogen look awfully alike from a
physical perspective). Inside a nodule, the plant maintains an anaerobic
condition that protects the bacteria from oxygen, which for some reason plants
like to produce. Not surprisingly, these nodules tend to be in the roots
(which, from a naive design point of view would not necessarily be where you
would think of grabbing nitrogen from). Added efficiency is critical, because
nitrogenase is already a VERY inefficient enzyme. 16!! ATP + N2 -> 2ammonia +
hydrogen! There are often enzymes in these bacteria whose purpose is to
recycle the wasted energy from the hydrogen produced from nitrogenase.

Upshot, without some serious plant engineering, at the very least using
aggressive husbandry techniques, it's likely this tech will hit a hard ceiling
in terms of usefulness.

~~~
Blahah
[Also reposting, from the thread of your other comment...]

This problem is already solved in C4 plants, which account for many crops
(sugarcane, maize, sorghum, barley, etc.). C4 photosynthesis creates an anoxic
environment in bundle sheath cells to stop RuBisCO wastefully fixing oxygen
instead of CO2. So nitrogenase, suffering as it does from the same oxygen
discrimination problem as RuBisCO, will operate efficiently in BS cells. C4 is
being introduced to more crops, and that's what I'm working on. So, two birds
with the same fistful of stones.

~~~
dnautics
Assuming your bacteria make intracellularly into those particular cells. That
might require a lot of luck, or reengineering those plants or the bacteria.

------
moconnor
So, plants able to do this have a strong evolutionary advantage over many
other plant species on this planet? Nah, couldn't possibly go wrong.

~~~
VLM
Strong evolutionary DIS-advantage compared to non-fixing plants in any non-
nitrogen-deficient soil. Doesn't matter if you fix nitrogen in a chemical
plant or a plant root, it takes lots and lots of energy.

Its a natural ecological cycle like many others with oscillations and such.
Given a couple decades, a soil saturated with nitrogen would probably result
in the non-fixers wiping out the fixers.

The more flippant answer is it can't be any worse than Kudzu. Kudzu is an
edible (edible by goat standards) nitro-fixer that is eating the south. I
would guess that issuing a human edible competitor to Kudzu would be a net
win? Cover the American North with kudzu-like layer of super-wheat wouldn't be
so bad...

~~~
rthomas6
Technically I think Kudzu is human-edible. I don't know how good it tastes,
but I know you can eat it.

~~~
garysweaver
Also fit for livestock, but difficult to bale. And used medicinally (anti-
inflammatory, antimicrobial to treat headaches, tinnitus, vertigo, Wei
syndrome, alcoholism and hangover), and even for basketry. Unfortunately, the
U.S. just considers it a nuisance and doesn't take advantage of it.

