Research into bacteria strains that are both competitive and efficient in nitrogen fixation and developing plants with those characteristics is the goal of NDSU research started in October 2024.

Legumes like soybeans, alfalfa, peas, beans, peanuts and many more have a remarkable ability: They can partner with soil ...

Bacteria are only the only organisms that are able to 'fix' nitrogen, or remove it from the atmosphere and convert it into a useful form. While some plants seem to fix nitrogen, it is actually ...

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 ...

When cover crops became a hot topic a few years ago, I tried to relabel them as “forage-covers” because they are multiuse ...

A new study finds that UCYN-A, a species of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, may be evolving organelle-like characteristics. Nitrogen is a nutrient essential for all life on Earth. Although nitrogen gas ...

Ancient cycad lineages that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs may have done so by relying on symbiotic bacteria in their roots to fix atmospheric nitrogen. The finding came from an effort to ...

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 ...

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign study testing a gene-edited bacterial inoculant found it supplied up to 35 pounds of nitrogen to corn during early growth. If corn was ever jealous of soybean ...

Scientists are uncovering the genetic switches that let legumes team up with bacteria to pull nitrogen from the air. By tweaking just two amino acids in a key receptor, they’ve made non-legume plants ...