@jameshowell Not a biologist here, or even a chemist, but that’s really interesting, i’m also quite excited by the possibility of having plants that grow without the need of fertilizers, but i’m curious, if this is so effective, and would be especially in the atmosphere, why has this not taken over land, and instead seem to only happen in a marine algae? 🤔 I would expect this innovation to have found a way to land in the last 100M years and tap into our gigantic N2 reserves…
@rayckeith@tshirtman Yes, a few types of plants, most notably legumes, have root nodules where intracellular bacterial symbionts fix nitrogen.
But the symbiont doesn't need to live in those plant cells, so you could imaginatively think of it as early in the process of becoming a possible future organelle!
@jameshowell@rayckeith Yes, that part, I knew a little about, I’ve grown some beans and learned about the trick. Didn’t think of it as possibly being a precursor to an organelle. Since they are in the ground, I do assume that limits their capacity to access the nitrogen to fix, I would expect an organelle in the plant cells, or like that weird corn (new to me!), bacteria on top of it, would be more efficient, but it’s very naive assumptions.
@jameshowell This article about the slimy corn indicates that there are even bacteria and fungi that can live between cells and do the same thing, companies seemed to be eager to market them, and since that was over 5 years ago, and i didn’t hear about an endophyte revolution, I wonder if it’s also a niche thing, only used by plants when there is no nitrogen available in the ground, but too costly otherwise, and thus not very high impact on the whole agriculture thing we have going.
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