Scientists discover first algae that can fix nitrogen
July 7, 2024 6:25 PM Subscribe
Oh, and here's the wikipedia article on UCYN-A, the critter in question; as that article implies (and to my extremely limited understanding) one of the really fascinating things about this is that we appear to have caught evolution in the process of turning something from an endosymbiont into an organelle, a rare and wondrous thing.
posted by multics at 6:52 PM on July 7 [5 favorites]
posted by multics at 6:52 PM on July 7 [5 favorites]
it appears that the link from the senior author's website gets you to the full publication in Science.
posted by logicpunk at 6:57 PM on July 7 [4 favorites]
posted by logicpunk at 6:57 PM on July 7 [4 favorites]
Nature finds a way. awesome stuff.
posted by lalochezia at 7:49 PM on July 7
posted by lalochezia at 7:49 PM on July 7
Something I've wondered for a while, if plants could broadly fix their own nitrogen directly from the atmosphere, what sort of implications would that have? Presumably any plant that figures that out would have a competitive advantage over others, and would only in practice be limited by other nutrients. In certain favorable locales, would there be a bit of a "green goo" scenario?
posted by tclark at 8:51 PM on July 7
posted by tclark at 8:51 PM on July 7
Presumably any plant that figures that out would have a competitive advantage over others
On the time scale over which this kind of change happens, probably not. By the time any such advantage had had time to get consequential, the proteins whose formation the fixed nitrogen enabled in those plants would have become food for topsoil and the nitrogen fixation benefits would end up pretty widely shared around.
You can already see this kind of thing happening with plants like the legume family that have nitrogen fixing bacteria as symbionts. Planting clover in your lawn does not suddenly crowd out all the grasses and other lawn plants; rather, it makes the entire lawn ecosystem capable of thriving without requiring regular addition of nitrogenous fertilizer.
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 PM on July 7 [1 favorite]
On the time scale over which this kind of change happens, probably not. By the time any such advantage had had time to get consequential, the proteins whose formation the fixed nitrogen enabled in those plants would have become food for topsoil and the nitrogen fixation benefits would end up pretty widely shared around.
You can already see this kind of thing happening with plants like the legume family that have nitrogen fixing bacteria as symbionts. Planting clover in your lawn does not suddenly crowd out all the grasses and other lawn plants; rather, it makes the entire lawn ecosystem capable of thriving without requiring regular addition of nitrogenous fertilizer.
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 PM on July 7 [1 favorite]
Presumably any plant that figures that out would have a competitive advantage over others
Only if the evolutionary and energetic costs of having and expressing genes for fixing nitrogen are less than simply relying on other organisms to do the job.
There is no free lunch here; having this machinery comes with costs and means that such a plant will have less resources for other aspects of life, which may hurt its chances to survive and reproduce and pass its genes to offspring.
That you don't see plants having evolved this chemistry probably means that it has been easier for them to propagate, when they let other organisms do the work.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:54 AM on July 8 [2 favorites]
Only if the evolutionary and energetic costs of having and expressing genes for fixing nitrogen are less than simply relying on other organisms to do the job.
There is no free lunch here; having this machinery comes with costs and means that such a plant will have less resources for other aspects of life, which may hurt its chances to survive and reproduce and pass its genes to offspring.
That you don't see plants having evolved this chemistry probably means that it has been easier for them to propagate, when they let other organisms do the work.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:54 AM on July 8 [2 favorites]
Also, while everything needs nitrogen, not all ecosystems spend most of their time nitrogen-limited. IIRC even legumes recruit a smaller mass of N fixing microbes when growing in available-N-rich soil.
posted by clew at 7:35 AM on July 8
posted by clew at 7:35 AM on July 8
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posted by multics at 6:41 PM on July 7