Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plant growth, but the overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture is not sustainable.
"Engineering associative diazotrophs to provide nitrogen to crops is a promising and relatively quickly realizable solution to the high cost and sustainability issues associated with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers," writes the research team, led by senior author Jean-Michel Ané of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
However, these mutualisms only occur in a small number of plants and a scant number of crop species. If more plants were able to form associations with nitrogen fixers, it would lessen the need for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, but these sorts of relationships take eons to evolve naturally. An alternative method—the topic of this review—would involve engineering both plants and nitrogen-fixing microbes to facilitate mutualistic associations. Essentially, plants would be engineered to be better hosts, and microbes would be engineered to release fixed nitrogen more readily when they encounter molecules that are secreted by the engineered plant hosts.
The approach would rely on bi-directional signaling between plants and microbes, something that already occurs naturally. Microbes have chemoreceptors that allow them to sense metabolites that plants secrete into the soil, while plants are able to sense microbe-associated molecular patterns and microbe-secreted plant hormones. These signaling pathways could be tweaked via genetic engineering to make communication more specific between pairs of engineered plants and microbes.
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