The Bright Future

So far, we has concentrated on increasing the quantity of nitrogen fertilizer being spread on the leguminous plants which have root nodule. That means plants without root nodule cannot benefit from our project. In order to apply our project in more aspects, we hope to make non-legume species adopt rhizobia actively and they become the symbiotic partners afterwards. In this way, crop yields would increase and the nitrogen dependence of agricultural industry would decrease. We intend to achieve our goal by getting more understanding of immunologic mechanism. Why would leguminous plants not regard rhizobia as enemy like facing other deleterious bacteria? The recognition system behind it would lead us the way to go further.

Modern agriculture not only relies on mechanization but chemical fertilizers as well. In natural world, biological fertilizers provide most nutrients for plants. Biological fertilizers include metabolite and debris of microorganism. We use microorganisms to deliver molybdenum to the plants which need this element to uptake nutrients. These E. coli we use would bring the metabolite and debris to nurture plants. Through our project, we hope to arouse people’s interests on biological fertilizers and put forward more creative ideas. We also hope that, in the near future, biological fertilizer would become the main nutrient source for agriculture industry as well.

When pollution of heavy metal or petroleum happens, microorganisms have already been used to gather and degenerate the pollution. Our project also provides a new solution to degenerate the pollution of molybdenum.

The Story of E.coli Prometheus

BNU-China