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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

All known life forms require nitrogen. However, more than 70% of all nitrogen on Earth occurs as inert, triple-bonded dinitrogen gas in the atmosphere, which is generally biologically unavailable. A ...