Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle | Hacker News Reader

Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

newscenter.lbl.gov

209 pointssoVeryTired59 comments

Using this to reduce the need for fertilizer would be awesome, but the engineer in me has to ask “What could possibly go wrong”. Interstellar showed one scenario. A nitrogen absorbing crop-blight or species out-evolving out food crops and overtaking them. With far more fuel the odds would be in favor of species that can consume nitrogen, and how do you keep those at bay when it happens?

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544283/nordenholts-million/

> In this novel originally published in 1923, as denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spreads around the world, toppling civilizations and threatening to wipe out humankind, the British plutocrat Nordenholt sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a ruthlessly efficient, entirely undemocratic, survivalist colony established in Scotland's Clyde Valley.

Thanks for this. Published 1923, so it's public domain too.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64567

If you’re an engineer, surely you recognize that the major plot whole in the movie is that doing an interstellar travel is way more difficult than whatever blight they had to fight.

Not the only plot hole, but yeah, agreed.

It’s not a mere plot hole, it’s the premise of the movie. To me that was a major turnoff

I just assumed it was a metaphor for runaway climate change, which they didn't want to spell out because of the political noise it'd generate. Just like in Matrix I assumed that the nonsensical "humans as energy source" was a metaphor for "humans as coprocessors."

Basically if there's an easy way to change the explanations so the movie makes more sense to scientists, but it would have made less sense to much of the general audience, I just cut them some slack.

You're at least definitely correct about The Matrix; humans as processors was the original idea. Unclear why it was changed, but probably a producer thought batteries would be more accessible.

Same for me. It's as if launching a biodome into space is easier than just making a biodome on Earth and just keeping it there.

It's not necessarily leading to the overgrowth. Nitrogen fixation is a really expensive process. It means you will need to spend a lot of energy on this process. The nature is a self balanced eco system. Species need to have certain amount of growth speed to keep itself competitive. A species that growth much slower but not require extra supplement is not necessary going to win the original one if it just get wipe out of the ecosystem.

> ...or species out-evolving out food crops and overtaking them. With far more fuel the odds would be in favor of species that can consume nitrogen, and how do you keep those at bay when it happens?

We have always had this problem of other species outcompeting crops - we call the undesired-but-superiror-plants "weeds" and traditionally they were removed mechanically. The 20th century saw the invention of achieving the dame task via sprayed chemicals such as Round-Up.

All plants are "nitrogen absorbing", even those that can fix nitrogen. After all, nitrogen fixation is terribly expensive in energy, so plants avoid doing it if they can.

This has been going on for 100m years. I doubt we are in any urgent danger.

So have mass extinction events.

  "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
  
  Albert Allen Bartlett

If there is even a 0.001% chance of an organism with this artificially tacked on to it getting in to the wild, the experiment is not worth anything to be potentially learned from it.

It could cause our starvation well before we could respond effectively.

If the exponent is so small that it's not reached 1 in 100,000,000 years we're safe until humanity goes extinct.

I know what you mean but "we're safe until we go extinct" doesn't give me warm fuzzies :)

You're an optimist.

So that's already happened. It's called an algae bloom. They don't necessarily fix their own nitrogen though, we fix it for them and dump it into oceans (we're quite a bit better at it than nature at this point). Biological fixation of nitrogen like this would be overly complicated to engineer (compared to regular symbiosis like between legumes and root bacteria) and isn't as energy efficient (plants would waste a lot of energy maintaining the organelles). We have gotten quite good at pulling nitrogen from the air and turning it into bioavailable nitrogen and flooding ecosystems with it already. In terms of how we keep them at bay, we don't it's kind of a problem.

It is curious that, apparently, almost all agricultural technology is focused on to break the ecosystem between the crops.

That tech discards the nitrogen that would be produced by microorganisms and animals like worms, included seasonally shed leaves plants with deep roots, while promote "solutions" towards the soil desertification and the dependence on multinational corporations that destroy such sings of life around the crop (what also introduce Cancer in our lives), to sell their annual interdependence solutions, as Bayer-Monsanto does.

IMHO, the bioengineering tech for crops should be more focused in the ecosystem equilibrium, predators for the plages only over the specified plants, which should include micro-robotics also ( Before harvesting, command to make predators leave the plants ).

It seems more than 60% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by algae, if new algae are introduced into the ecosystem and modified to massively consume nitrogen from the atmosphere for crops, one can take for sure that a planetary scale problem will arise.

My brother has lost a whole crop to snails and had to replant, I was redirected to you by the insurance to get a refund.

At the same time the harvester deposits the seed, it also deposits the micro-bots that will circulate in the plant at time it grow, whom will attack any non-flying pests. At the same time, you put other plants grow around, designed to compensate nutrients in a balanced ecosystem and at same time designed as habitat for the necessary pollinators and necessary natural predators. You only collect the crop lines, the rest you preserved with automated systems. This is why I commented should include micro-robotics.

so crazy is it? It's just an Akira Miyawaki style applied to crops plus tech.

What I was expecting is a comment in line about the harvest is a nutrient extraction process, similar to a mineral mine. Therefore, even with a balanced ecosystem, there may come a time when the compost from the harvest, or animal excrement that consumed the crop, is needed to replenish what was taken by the crop for to close the loop. In such a case, it should be applied in liquid form by injecting it underground at the same time the seed is planted, but not in the same quantities that are required today, thanks to the balanced ecosystem, which rewards also with high-quality crops.

Nitrogen fixing bacteria existed for a long time, they didn't took over the world.

> With far more fuel the odds would be in favor of species that can consume nitrogen, and how do you keep those at bay when it happens?

Harvest them like we did with guano deposits. Won't take long for a second Guano Island Act [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act

No doubt we'll see this transplanted into GM crops for reduced fertilizer need.

Since we spend a couple percent of our total energy consumption just on turning nitrogen into fertilizer, anything that reduces our dependence would be awesome for the climate.

I don't think so. Biological nitrogen fixation is far too inefficient for this to make sense. Deceased in yield would be too big tfor this to make sense

To give some numbers, just the fixation takes 5.4 more energy, and photosynthesis is 6 times less efficient than solar panels. Moving to biological fixation would also increase water and pesticide usage

Maybe we'll make some progress in human genetic engineering and get it in us too. We'd be able to eliminate the need for B3 vitamins!

I’ll let other people try that out, then in 20 years we’ll do the classic “well sh/t, messing with this actually* also messes that up. Whoops!”

Well I guess we need to figure out how to regression test humans then!

It'll be lots of fun when AGI starts doing unit tests on us.

It'll be too busy arguing with itself over whether its an integration test or not

In fact back to the original comment we’re finding out that shoving chemicals and GM crops in to complex ecosystems messes a lot of stuff up too.

IVG + gene editing, we're already there!

Or worse, multiple faster than algaes and sucking up all the Nitrogen from thr air.

A photosynthetic organism that fixed more nitrogen than it needed would (1) be at a terrible competitive disadvantage (nitrogen fixation requires a great deal of energy), and (2) would be a source of fixed nitrogen when it died, boosting the growth of other plants that could leech off its efforts.

Do you realise 70% of the atmosphere is nitrogen? We will not run out of it.

make that 78%

Removing the nitrogen bottleneck would let them capture carbon faster. Given our predicament I'd say we should take all the help we get.

Remove too much carbon however and the plants die.

We don't want a Great Decarbonification Event.

Decaying plants emit carbon. The extra nitrogen would just be changing is the length of the give-your-carbon-back-to-the-atmosphere queue. It's negative feedback: stable.

Nitrogen is inert. Even if you could run out of N2 (unlikely), it would have no effect.

That's wrong, the fact that is inert doesn't mean it's useless

If you remove all nitrogen from atmosphere, there WILL be consequences

The sibling comment about lift is one of the few things I can think of. Birds would have a tough time. The freezing point of water would also be lowered significantly.

Eliminating a gas while keeping all other partial pressures constant only affects physical processes. Biochemistry on the other hand only relies on partial pressures, and the number of organisms which interact with atmospheric nitrogen are literally so few that you could count them on one hand.

This is all pretty far afield though. There's no way biological processes are even going to have a dent in the ocean of N2 surrounding us.

Current planes will not be able to fly since they will lose 70% of lift. They will grow gigantic wings.

There'd be less drag on rockets too. That could be a plus for when we need to escape the death spiral we create

Except burning your lungs in the not-so-long run, as they are not evolved to deal with a pure oxygen atmosphere.

Lungs do absolutely fine in 3 psi pure oxygen.

Lungs are damaged by high PPO2, not high FO2.

Eh, that's really hard to do and fertilizer is cheap you just zap some air with electricity and You're chilling. Plus legumes have the better version figured out imo - symbiotic bacteria instead of having to support a whole new organelle.

Primary sources:

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(24)00182-X.pdf

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38603509/

The first is open access.

Reminds me of this ancient plant that produces its own fertilizer from Nitrogen with bacteria https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/amaizeba...

Also legumes!

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011438

Thanks. :)

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40101290 for more discussion (although IMHO this here is the better link)

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