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As farmers spend billions of dollars spreading nitrogen on their fields this spring, researchers at the 91Ï㽶¶ÌÊÓƵ are working toward less reliance on the fertilizer.

Less dependence on nitrogen could start with a simple type of grass, Setaria viridis, and its relationship with bacteria. The plant promises to lay groundwork for scientists exploring the relationship between crops and the fixing nitrogen bacteria that provide them the nitrogen amount plants need daily.

“In science sometimes you have to believe because we often work with such small microorganisms and DNA that you cannot see,” said Fernanda Amaral, coauthor and MU postdoctoral fellow at Bond Life Sciences Center. “Before this research no one had actually proved such evidence that nitrogen excreted by bacteria could be incorporated into plants like this.”

Biological Nitrogen fixation — where diazotrophic bacteria fix atmospheric nitrogen and convert it to ammonium — provides a free way for plants to alter and absorb the nutrient. Farmers have long known that legumes like soybean fix nitrogen due to the symbiosis with bacteria in the soil through development of nodules on their roots, but since grasses like corn and rice don’t form this specialized structures that relationship has been trickier to explore.

Yet in fact, this team’s experiments showed the grass Setaria viridis received 100 percent of its nitrogen needs from the bacteria Azospirillum brasilense when associated with plant root surfaces.

“I believed in these bacteria’s ability, but I was really surprised that the amount of nitrogen fixed by the bacteria was 100 percent,” said Amaral, who works in the lab of Gary Stacey, the Curators Professor of Plant Sciences in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. “That’s really cool, and that nitrogen can make so much of a difference in the plant.”

Worldwide farmers used more than 100 million tons of nitrogen on fields in 2011, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In the same year, the U.S. alone produced and imported more than $37 billion in nitrogen. This grass can serve as a simple model for research, standing in for grass relatives such as corn, rice and sugarcane to explore a similar relationship in those crops. This research, “,” was published in the March 2015 issue of The Plant Journal.