Nitrogen is essential for life. It's needed to build proteins, DNA and many other components of cells. Although nitrogen gas makes up almost 80% of Earth's atmosphere, most organisms cannot use it ...

A two-year field study in southern Germany found that lentil grown with cereal companions derived up to 95 percent of its ...

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 ...

Nitrogen is a key nutrient because it fuels the growth of plankton, which forms the basis of the marine food web. Two opposing processes determine the global nitrogen cycle: nitrogen fixation and ...

An oxygen sensor protein protects the enzymatic machinery of biological nitrogen fixation from serious damage, and its use in biotechnology could help to reduce the use of synthetic fertilizer in ...

Ever wanted to produce nitrogen fertilizer like they did in the 1900s? In that case, you’re probably looking at the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was the first industrial-scale atmospheric nitrogen ...

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 ...

When we think of the atmosphere and its necessity in sustaining life, we are thinking of oxygen and for plants, carbon dioxide. There is another chemical, though, a clear, odorless and tasteless gas ...

Reforestation projects could be made more effective with the findings of new research into the constraints on nitrogen fixation among plants. Some trees, such as those from the Fabaceae or legume ...

Leguminous crops play a vital role in sustainable agriculture by harnessing atmospheric nitrogen through symbiotic relationships with rhizobia bacteria. This process of biological nitrogen fixation ...