Claire Palmer, a postdoc in the biochemistry department, received $225,000 for her project Leveraging the root microbiome for sustainable cereal crop production through NIFA’s AFRI Agricultural Microbiomes in Plant Systems and Natural Resources program. It was among 19 projects sharing $12 million in funding.

Project summary (from CRIS website): Farmers use fertilizers to provide corn with the essential element, nitrogen. However, current nitrogen fertilizer strategies are inefficient and negatively impact the environment. Non-renewable and polluting natural gas is required to generate most nitrogen fertilizers. Additionally, the process of applying nitrogen fertilizers to fields is inefficient; greater than half of the nutrients can be lost to agricultural runoff instead of supporting crop growth. This also causes environmental damage like algae blooms in lakes and contamination of drinking water. As an alternative, scientists are interested in using microbes that live in the soil and on corn roots to provide crops with nitrogen. Diazotrophs are a type of microbes that can convert nitrogen in the air into a form accessible to plants through a process called nitrogen fixation. While researchers have extensively studied individual diazotrophs, less is known about how diazotrophs interact with each other and the other microbes that live around corn roots.In my research project, I am interested in studying interactions within the community of microbes living around corn roots and how these interactions impact nitrogen fixation. I will use this information to design microbial mixtures that could be applied to crops as fertilizer alternatives. I plan to do this by combining different species in the lab and observing how they grow together. I will additionally test the total nitrogen fixation activity produced by these different microbial combinations. Then, I will use these data to build mathematical models to predict which species combinations will lead to improved nitrogen fixation activity. Using similar approaches, I will further investigate how different nutrients secreted by corn roots impact community growth and nitrogen fixation. Nitrogen fixation can be inhibited by the presence of oxygen. I therefore will engineer key microbial strains to further support nitrogen fixation through oxygen consumption. Through this research project I will generate microbially-based fertilizer alternatives for corn as well as provide the agricultural research field with further insight into the process of nitrogen fixation.