If not for a single type of enzyme — nitrogenase — no living thing on Earth would be able to break down nitrogen in the atmosphere and build new cells.
A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers is looking into how a better understanding of nitrogenase, and the origins of life on Earth, could help improve modern agriculture. And maybe even allow us to find life on other planets.
The team recently received a $1.3 million Keck Foundation grant to further their research.
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Betül Kaçar is an associate professor of bacteriology at UW-Madison and leads the nitrogenase research team. Kaçar spoke recently on WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” She said all forms of life use nitrogen in some way.
“Microbes take this abundant form in the atmosphere and fix it into a usable form for all other organisms, usually by the way of plants,” she said. “Nitrogen is a very important element. It is present in our DNA. … We really need this for our own existence.”
Nitrogenase has been around since the first days of life on Earth, according to Kaçar. Living things have relied on it for billions of years, as the planet went from being inhospitable and “alien” for human life — to the one we call home today.
With funding from the grant, Kaçar’s team plans to build a “complete natural history” of nitrogenase to better understand how the enzyme stayed relevant for billions of years, despite multiple dramatic shifts in climate over that time.
The team’s research, Kaçar said, could help farmers maintain solid crop yields in the face of more extreme weather events due to climate change.
By understanding the origins of nitrogenase and its connection to life, researchers could possibly fine-tune its cell-building properties to help crops adapt.
“We will have to make smart decisions about our bioengineering ideas and our own technological developments, when it comes to mitigating the immediate crises that are facing our planet,” said Kaçar. “Crops — pretty much everything that we rely on in order to feed ourselves — will be affected.”
Kaçar said learning more about the nitrogenase enzyme will help unlock our ability to make it more resilient, “to enable its persistence under very challenging conditions.”
The research team has their sights set much higher than agriculture, as well — off-planet, actually. Kaçar’s research on life’s origins, she said, could help researchers better identify the signs and conditions where extraterrestrial life could be.
“When it comes to understanding a planet,” Kaçar said, “the color and the composition of the atmosphere, the gasses and what is really going on to create that sign of [life], that’s going to come through the understanding of the diversity of microbes on this planet and what it is capable of.”
