If fully successful, it would make the crops self-fertilising for nitrogen, and this is
a key requirement for sustainable agriculture now and in the years ahead.
What Ted's done is take in atmospheric nitrogen, we can unlock that, we have a key like it's
going in a padlock, we unlock the nitrogen from the atmosphere and get it into the crops,
any crop in the world.
So it's really exciting, and it's stimulated interest from government level, to potential
collaborators already.
Plants can't fix nitrogen from the air themselves.
They need to link up with a suitable nitrogen-fixing bacterium.
And this particular nitrogen-fixing bacterium, that we found in sugar cane, enables a very
wide range of crop plants to fix nitrogen in symbiotic interaction with these nitrogen-fixing
bacteria.
Only legumes can get there nitrogen from the air by symbiotic interaction with nitrogen-fixing
bacteria.
We're going to spread this to all the major cereals of the world and other non-legume
crops.
All the crop plants produce a root system, and this root system can be interacted with
a nitrogen-fixing bacterium, such as the one we're working with from sugarcane, and this
will invade the young cells of the root here, and these will become invaded, and you will
get intracellular colonisation of the root cells.
What does that mean?
Intracellular colonisation of the root cells means that these bacteria, which are here,
are inside the cell.
They're in the cytoplasm of the cell.
They're actually surrounded by a membrane in the cytoplasm.
So they set up home in an organised way so that they can fix nitrogen in those cells
and get energy for that fixation from the plant's photosynthesis.
There are some crops which can already fix nitrogen from the air.
But the major crops of the world, the cereals and other non-legume crops, are unable to
do this and this is the major challenge for agriculture, and to become sustainable using
biological systems, biologically occurring nitrogen-fixing bacteria, to fix the nitrogen
from the air so that it's available to these other major crops.
When we initially started it was failure, but then we found that we could stimulate
the bacterium to get inside by giving it some sucrose.
It was the key, I think, because this bacterium grows in sugarcane and it's in sugarcane juice
and this is a very rich source of sucrose, and it likes this stimulation to begin with
and then it gets inside the cell and is happy because it can get even more sucrose from
the plant carrying out photosynthesis.
The seeds require the bacteria to be present when the seeds are sown so to ensure that
the bacteria are there as the seed germinates.
What we're doing is we're coating the seeds with this nitrogen-fixing bacterium.
You use the equivalent of a hairspray sticker to get the bacteria to attach to the seeds,
and as the seeds germinate then the bacteria will be waiting.
They will be waiting to interact with the emerging root of the seed.
This work has taken, on this particular specific bacterium, it's taken about twelve years.
It's taken so long because we were adventurers, we didn't know that this bacterium would work
and get inside plant cells, and indeed most people that we spoke to assured us that it
would never get into plant cells.
It will transform global food security because so much effort goes into the production of
synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.
The cost of them, the negative effects on the environment of using them, and also the
negative effects on the environment of polluting them.
So this is providing a major inroad into sustainable agriculture, where one is not using chemical
reactions, but one is using biological systems which are environmentally friendly.
The nitrogen market is worth in excess of 80 billion.
On that basis, we capture a few percent of that, this is a game changer technology.