14 DAY TRIAL // A new set of tools developed by experts with the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS) could soon help authorities mitigate nitrogen-induced river and groundwater pollution. These tools could also help improve crop yields, and decrease overall health risks for humans, as well as for the environment.
Nitrogen pollution is a very pervasive and severe problem. It is largely caused by the massive amounts of the chemical that need to be administered to crop plants in order to boost their growth and yield. At this point, most nitrogen is delivered via fertilizers, which make for an inefficient mechanism.
This substance is essential for plants, which use it to construct compounds and molecules including DNA and proteins. The amount of nitrogen that vegetation takes from the ground depends on the energy status of the plants, as well as on demand and availability.
Unfortunately, while researchers understand how nitrogen is cycled through plants relatively well, they are still in the dark about how some of the transport proteins that ferry the chemical around in plants work. The new set of tools makes observing nitrogen uptake processes significantly easier.
By applying the newly developed capabilities, scientists will become able to better predict the amount of nitrogen that will be used up by plants, as well as develop more efficient delivery mechanisms. These aspects will then contribute to minimizing pollution and nitrogen runoff and contamination.
The new study was led by researchers Cheng-Hsun Ho and Wolf Frommer, who are both based at CIS. Details of their work will appear in the March 11 issue of the journal eLife, and are already available online. The key to the new survey tools are fluorescent tags applied to the DNA of plant cells.
These tags start to pop out when investigators shine light of a particular wavelength on cell samples. At this point, the technology has been refined for 5 individual nitrogen transport molecules. Experts believe that these molecules play a role in nitrogen uptake and assimilation across multiple species.
“We engineered these sensors to monitor the activity and regulation of suspected nitrogen transporters in living plant roots, which otherwise are impossible to study. This suite of tools will vastly improve our understanding of the nitrogen-uptake process and will help to develop increased crop yields and decrease fertilizer-caused pollution,” Frommer explains.
An added benefit of the new study is that the technique can be customized to track other similar processes in different plant species, and even in animals, including humans.