“The goal is to place genes into the crops’ mitochondria and chloroplast enabling them to generate sufficient energy to drive nitrogen fixation,” Yang says. “This is a pretty cool piece of evidence. Essentially, these staple caloric crops – rice, corn, potatoes – could have built-in fertilizer.”
The team initially narrowed the number of genes needed to fix nitrogen to nine, and identified gene combinations they thought were essential to complete the process. To their surprise, they discovered genes they’d designated as critical middlemen could be omitted.