"We are trying to build up a pattern of how nodulation evolved in these more primitive and mainly tree relatives of the advanced crops peas and beans in order to see how we might engineer a simple symbiosis into maize"

An international effort to develop maize crops that don’t need fertiliser has taken Hutton scientist Euan James to the deepest reaches of the Amazon River, on a quest for samples of root nodules from legume trees to help understand how these plants were able to develop the ability to obtain their own nitrogen from soil – and whether this trait can be transferred to other crops.

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This article was originally posted by The James Hutton Institute