VANCOUVER, Wash. — Researchers at Washington State University are a step closer to reducing the need for expensive fertilizers on cereal crops by using modified bacteria to harvest nitrogen.
Scientists identified genes in rhizobia bacteria that could be moved into other bacteria that do not harvest nitrogen, the university said in a news release.
The university said it is a “finding that shines light on how plants and microbes have evolved to work together over tens of millions of years, as well as signaling future potential for reducing fertilizer use at a time of shortages and skyrocketing costs for farmers.”
The findings stem from research that has been underway for about a decade.
The process is called endosymbiosis, in which microbes and host cells combine into one. In these cases, the microbes live inside plant cells, the university said.
WSU biological sciences associate professor Stephanie Porter, postdoctoral scholar Angeliqua Montoya and researchers at Brigham Young University published the latest research in the journal Cell Biology.
The team mated nitrogen-harvesting bacteria with bacteria that do not function that way. Typically, the two types of bacteria do not mate, but this attempt succeeded thanks to a genetic tool they developed.
Researchers attempted millions of pairings, and many separate strains converted successfully, especially bacteria closely related to the nitrogen-harvesting originals.
Most interactions helped the host and, contrary to researchers’ expectations, did not cause harm.
The scientists plan to study which strains had the best outcomes in transferring the nitrogen-harvesting ability.
“Our study could hopefully motivate people to continue transferring these nitrogen-fixing segments of genes into new strains to understand how they interact with the background genome, and to slowly pick apart what makes it work or not work,” Montoya said in a news release announcing the findings.
The researchers also envision real-world applications for crops that currently rely on fertilizer.
“We can study the kinds of genes and variants that make this transfer successful and get better and better at making these kinds of conversions to help farmers have enough nitrogen for their crops,” Porter said in a statement.
©2026 Cox Media Group
