9.20.22-Sustainability-Christopher-Voigt-V2

Conference Video|Duration: 21:09
September 20, 2022
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    Nitrogenous fertilizer is critical to obtain high crop yields, but its production and use consumes 3% of the global energy supply and 2-6% of greenhouse gases, including potent N2O. Biological nitrogen fixation offers an alternative, but the nitrogenase is a complex enzyme that requires dozens of genes and tight regulation to function and symbiotic relationships with crops are difficult to control.  Here, I will present several approaches we are taking to engineer corn or corn-associated microbes to fix their own nitrogen.  First, I will discuss approaches to engineer bacteria that associate with maize roots to break and replace their regulatory pathways so that they turn on nitrogen fixation even in the presence of applied nitrogen fertilizer.  Second, I will describe efforts to engineer plants themselves to carry the microbial pathways. Collectively,  approaches from Synthetic Biology are facilitating new approaches to this long-standing problem to produce self-fertilizing crop systems.
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  • Video details
    Nitrogenous fertilizer is critical to obtain high crop yields, but its production and use consumes 3% of the global energy supply and 2-6% of greenhouse gases, including potent N2O. Biological nitrogen fixation offers an alternative, but the nitrogenase is a complex enzyme that requires dozens of genes and tight regulation to function and symbiotic relationships with crops are difficult to control.  Here, I will present several approaches we are taking to engineer corn or corn-associated microbes to fix their own nitrogen.  First, I will discuss approaches to engineer bacteria that associate with maize roots to break and replace their regulatory pathways so that they turn on nitrogen fixation even in the presence of applied nitrogen fertilizer.  Second, I will describe efforts to engineer plants themselves to carry the microbial pathways. Collectively,  approaches from Synthetic Biology are facilitating new approaches to this long-standing problem to produce self-fertilizing crop systems.
Locked Interactive transcript