26-04-2013

The overuse of nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture can wreak havoc on waterways, health and the environment. An international team of scientists aims to lessen the reliance on these fertilizers by helping beans and similar plants boost their nitrogen production, even in areas with ...

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23-02-2010

Flightless birds, blind cave shrimp, and other oddities suggest a "use it or lose it" tendency in evolution. In the microbial world, an unusual marine microorganism appears to have ditched several major metabolic pathways, leaving it with a remarkably reduced set of genes. This metabolic ...

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21-10-2009

For the first time, the capacity of soya plants to absorb nitrogen from the air has been precisely determined in dry areas of Eastern Austria. The primary aim of this project, backed by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, is to compare methods for determining nitrogen fixation levels and their ...

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01-04-2009

Trichodesmium is unusual among marine microbes because it both "breathes" carbon dioxide like plants, while also taking nitrogen gas from the air and "fixing" it into a fertilizer of the seas. How Tricho does both these things has long puzzled researchers, since the two processes don't work ...

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30-06-2006

Scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC), Norwich and Washington State University, USA have managed to trigger nodulation in legumes, a key element of the nitrogen fixing process, without the bacteria normally necessary. This is an important step towards transferring nodulation, and possibly ...

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