Comment by Blahah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Blahah | Hacker News Reader

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This could be a world-changer if managed properly. I therefore think it's a great shame to see this being commercially licensed. The research was at least partly charitably funded: Cocking has had Leverhulme Trust money (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1079%2FIVP2005716). I find it remarkable that he's pursuing a for-profit commercialisation.

Others have commented about the 'strong evolutionary advantage' this will convey crop species. I think that unlikely: a large number of species in the Fabaceae family (legumes) have the ability to form symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and this simply allows them to exist on nutrient poor soil. But because it's a symbiosis, i.e. the plant trades some of the sugar it produces for the nitrate fixed by the bacteria, it's not a cost-free situation. Legumes don't dominate many habitats, but they do OK in very nutrient poor soils.

Modern crops don't perform well outside intensively nurtured field conditions. N-fixed crops will require less intensive nitrogen supplementation than before, but they will still perform poorly when competing against wild plants.

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the condition of the grant was that any inventions should be commercialised, and some of the ownership of the invention transferred back to the funding body. If a charitable body like the Leverhulme Trust can recoup some of its investment, that enables it go on and fund even more research.

If the commercialisation involves extracting money from people who will gladly pay it to get better crop yields or lower fertiliser costs - like industrialised farmers in the first world - then it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

What would be a real shame is if the prices were set so that people in the third world could not use this advance to keep themselves and each other from falling into food poverty. However, food shortage is rarely about production capacity, and more often about allocation. Amartya Sen's work and all that.

I agree that may be the case in general, but the Leverhulme trust explicitly doesn't fund research whose purpose is commercialisation (http://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/funding/RPG/RPG.cfm).

Your second and third points are very good ones; it all depends on the implementation. I join you in hoping for a licensing strategy that maximises the social benefit of the technology.

"Traditional" nitrogen fixing bacteria make their way to specialized nodules. Basically this is because the nitrogenase enzyme is incredibly oxygen-sensitive, and it's quite difficult to shield the interior of the enzyme selectively against oxygen (oxygen and nitrogen look awfully alike from a physical perspective). Inside a nodule, the plant maintains an anaerobic condition that protects the bacteria from oxygen, which for some reason plants like to produce. Added efficiency is critical, because nitrogenase is already a VERY inefficient enzyme. 16!! ATP + N2 -> 2ammonia + hydrogen! There are often enzymes in these bacteria whose purpose is to recycle the wasted energy from the hydrogen produced from nitrogenase.

And if you think there's a way to improve the efficiency of nitrogenase, that would be really welcome, since nature seems to have evolved it only once.

Upshot, without some serious plant engineering, at the very least using aggressive husbandry techniques, it's likely this tech will hit a hard ceiling in terms of usefulness.

This problem is already solved in C4 plants, which account for many crops (sugarcane, maize, sorghum, barley, etc.). C4 photosynthesis creates an anoxic environment in bundle sheath cells to stop RuBisCO wastefully fixing oxygen instead of CO2. So nitrogenase, suffering as it does from the same oxygen discrimination problem as RuBisCO, will operate efficiently in BS cells. C4 is being introduced to more crops, and that's what I'm working on. So, two birds with the same fistful of stones.

are you sure those bacteria can get into those cells or are the just hanging out interstitially? Plant cell walls are tough. Certainly, phytoplasma do it, so it's not impossible... But it may require some sort of plant-cell symbiotic communication which many not necessarily be evolved in the plants you want to use it, especially if at the moment the bacterium is semi-opportunistic.

Yes, the bacteria infect the apical meristem during embryo development and are included in all cell types and tissues of the mature plant simply by being present at all subsequent cell divisions. It's explained a bit in the patent [1], but there is other data scattered around the literature too.

1. http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US20090106865

Agreed. I've studied the impact of fertilizers on natural gas consumption, and the figures are stunning. If we were able to reduce fertilizer use by just 1%, we would save meaningful amounts of energy. If we could eliminate it entirely, it would be as big of a breakthrough as the green revolution.

It is a shame about the for-profit commercialization, but I think it's worth remembering that such things do sometimes result in faster implementation because the people working on it have more skin in the game. But either way, it will be public domain in 17 years worst case. I don't think that amount of time will make or break agriculture, and if you need 100% less fertilizer it's a pretty easy economic case.

You'd reduce fertilizer usage if you could prevent farmers from over-fertilizing. Simply following directions would be a huge step forward. Unfortunately there isn't a technical fix for stupid.

There is more to fertilizer than just Nitrogen compounds so you would still need a fertilizer, it just wouldn't need to be as nitrogen rich. And the farmers will continue to over fertilize.

"And the farmers will continue to over fertilize."

The smart corporate farmers don't over fertilize, it costs real money. Research the technology that they use, satellites, GPS and automated tractors/spray rigs that adjust in real time for specific soil needs.

Where do you get the idea that they are over fertilizing? The vast majority of them are on slim margins and watch everything like a hawk so I find it unlikely, given the costs, and their equipment that they are rampantly over fertilizing.

Not to mention the fact that over fertilizing will often reduce crop yields. The idea that the runoff of fertilizer products into groundwater, streams, lakes and oceans must be the result of over fertilization is false. It's the result of gravity.

Good point about possible faster implementation with patent incentive. I would love to see the research on that.

I believe that was the entire point of it. Keeping invention a personal use secret just wasn't cutting it.

Patents are good. Patent abuse is not. They need to be better regulated.

If you had a memory leak in a software program, would you try to solve it by packing your structures 1% better?

Agriculture has been under constant optimization for 80 years, and a 1% reduction in ammonia consumption is equivalent to $1B a year worldwide.

I think your analogy is flawed.

You realize that world population is going to grow by 1% in a year, right? Congratulations, your 'optimization' was just undone. As were those of the previous 80 years.

It never ceases to amaze me how so many above-average intelligent people are moving quickly yet don't seem to wonder about where they are actually going. I guess they're just not as lazy as I am. Me personally, I'd rather have enough idle land and unpolluted water for free range beef and wild fish, but I guess some people set their sights quite a bit lower.

Ah, I thought you were talking about waste in the actual food production process.

But who says I disagree? Suggesting that improving agricultural efficiency is useless because of population growth is just a logical fallacy, a version of a Straw Man. You're suggesting that I don't think we need to reduce population, when what I'm actually saying is that this is independently a big deal. I believe they call this particular version of the Straw Man an "Appeal to Worse Problems".

I think improving efficiency is indeed useless because it does not address sustainability. I don't care if its 99.999 'efficient', you're either depleting the earth or you're not. Something 10% efficient could be 100% sustainable.

And since nearly every post I see on here is about efficiency, and not sustainability, I'm compelled to offer another view point.

Okay. I mean, I agree. But sustainable does need to be defined. I think the common definition is that sustainable means that it will work for the next hundred years, at which point conditions will have changed sufficiently that decisions made now will be poor.

But yes, point taken that work to decrease population in a humane way is very important and underrated by technology driven people.

> they do OK in very nutrient poor soils

I generally agree with your comment, but I'd maybe say that "they can thrive in nitrogen-deficient soils". There are still other variables that affect the growth of nitrogen-fixers especially: soil pH; the quantity of other macro (and micro) nutrients like phosphorus, potassium, calcium, etc; and availability of water and sunlight.

Soybeans are a major crop that can fix nitrogen, but they may still need supplemental applications of phosphate, and the crop will die if not irrigated during a drought.

In other words: this is not a silver bullet that will magically make the problems of the world's crop-growers disappear overnight.

Indeed, I was nonspecific, and I agree with your details.

20 years of patent protection seems fair, considering the potential good that would come out of it. Maybe it would have taken another 20 years without the patent incentive.

The whole point of fertilizers is to grow plants on soil with too little Nitrogen for the desired yield. If these bacteria can lower the amounts of fertilizer per yield, that's good enough.

It might be hard to patent though. As far as I understood it you just need to infect the plants with the bacteria, and once the bacteria are out in the open, it will be hard to stop others from using them with or without intent...

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