Economic and environmental costs of chemical N in agriculture is becoming a global concern. At the same time climate, change together with food insecurity is the most pressing problem for the 21st century. Indicating the demand for sustainable agricultural practices including the use of legume- rhizobium symbiosis driven biological nitrogen fixation. Is it economically visible if these N-fixing properties of legume also introduced to cereals?
Since annual chemical N2 consumption is very high and costly for producers and farmers , unraveling a way that introduce how to transfer this important agricultural trait to non- legume crops ( cereals ) is valuable approach. In addition, chemical N2 production demand high temperature and derives negative effect on global warming issue. Beside, generally chemical fertilizers cause thermal pollution mainly water pollution which disrupts the natural food chain and..
considering all these consequences by chemicals consumption, I believe N2-fixing properties of legume should be introduced to cereals ( and other crops) sooner or later!
If biological nitrogen fixation introduced successfully by sereals it means revolution in agriculture and environmental protection from pollution by nitrogen fertilizer application , and decrease in nitrogen fertilizer uses or in this case the demand to nitrogen fertilizeres decrease to small amout of fertilzer for example to 5 kg N donum .
Rhizobia for legumes! arbuscular mycorrhizae for cereals!
In fact, i am not sure if it is economically visible to somehow introduce rhizobia to the crops as the plant-fungal symbiosis technologies are so common ...
There are no nitrogen fixation symbiosis as efficient as those of the legume:rhizobium symbiosis. The complex interaction between the partners has made it difficult to replicate in other systems, even after more than a generation of efforts. Nitrogen fixation has been used to supplement nitrogen in other crops including sugarcane, rice, millet and other grasses, either by secondary plant symbiosis like the azolla:anabaeina symbiosis in paddy rice or by free living nitrogen fixation in soil. Because nitrogen fixation is so energy intensive for the prokaryotic partner and occurs only under anaerobic conditions it is subject to regulation that turns it off when other nitrogen is present. This makes it hard to use both fixation and N fertilizer at the same time. Only prokaryotes are capable of nitrogen fixation. Mycorrhizae are great for other nutrient supplementation but cannot increase N. A good review on the topic can be found here: Article Nitrogen Fixation in Cereals
C. M. Lucy Joseph not yet but likely in near future, please have a look in the attachment
That research is indeed intriguing. The authors admit that engineering any of the families that contain many of the necessary 290 genes will be challenging. They also touch on the problem of anaerobiosis in the discussion of hemoglobin indicating that any of the plant bacteria partners that are selected will have unique problems to solve. Also while the plant families they discuss are indeed crop producing families none are cereals. I still think this is a worthy goal and something that may consume more careers in the process of studying it. I think it does us all a disservice to not acknowledge the tremendous amount of work that has been done already in pursuit of the goal and the challenges ahead for further study.
In fact they show that, most probably majority of the plants potentially are able to establish RN symbiosis which has been lost somehow during evolution, This is promising for future study to figure out pseudogenes and recover them for the original functions!
Yes, it is possible. We coordinated a project at Embrapa for this purpose "Biological Nitrogen Fixation in Rice Irrigated by Flood"
Maryam Seifikalhor is there other published or unpublished work that says this? The reference you gave only talks about 10 clades of related plants and says nothing about most or all plants. Is there something that has been done in monocotyledonous as opposed to dicotyledonous plants?
Maria Laura Turino Mattos has something been done recently on rice and nodulation at EMBRAPA? The only reference I can find says that they used some free living nitrogen fixing species and got no increase in crop yields with it. I have seen some further work elsewhere that shows some better results using other symbiotic systems that are grown in conjunction with the rice and then used to increase the available nitrogen for the entire cropping system.
C. M. Lucy Joseph
Your right, although they dont indicate parallel lose in all plants, this can be investigated in various plants including monocotyledonous individually, this is indeed what they suggest. My Phd was on this purpose though I worked on two sister species (Trema and Parasponia). Thus far I know they are developing array of experiments on different plants (Molecular biology laboratory of Wageningen University).
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