Creating plants that make their own fertilizer
Much of modern agriculture relies on biologically
available nitrogenous compounds (called “fixed” nitrogen) made by an
industrial process developed by German chemist Fritz Haber in 1909. Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, thinks it should be possible to design a better
nitrogen-fixing system. His idea is to put the apparatus for fixing
nitrogen in plant cells, the same cells that hold the apparatus for
capturing the energy in sunlight. The National Science Foundation just awarded Pakrasi and his team $3.87 million to explore this idea further.