Coated seeds may enable agriculture on marginal lands

Good news! The agricultural revolution continues! Much more land will be arable!

"A team of engineers has coated seeds with silk that has been treated with [nitrogen-fixing bacteria] that naturally produce a nitrogen fertilizer, to help the germinating plants develop. Tests have shown that these seeds can grow successfully in soils that are too salty to allow untreated seeds to develop normally.  ... biofertilizers that can be used to increase the amount of nutrients in the soil,” he says. These fertilizers use microbes that live symbiotically with certain plants and convert nitrogen from the air into a form that can be readily taken up by the plants ...  adding a particular nutrient to the mix, a kind of sugar known as trehalose, which some organisms use to survive under low-water conditions. The silk, bacteria, and trehalose were all suspended in water, and the researchers simply soaked the seeds in the solution for a few seconds to produce an even coating. ... In practice, such coatings could be applied to the seeds by either dipping or spray coating, the researchers say. Either process can be done at ordinary ambient temperature and pressure. “The process is fast, easy, and it might be scalable” to allow for larger farms and unskilled growers to make use of it, ... These rhizobacteria normally provide fertilizer to legume crops such as common beans and chickpeas, and those have been the focus of the research so far, but it may be possible to adapt them to work with other kinds of crops as well ... As a next step, the researchers are working on developing new coatings that could not only protect seeds from saline soil, but also make them more resistant to drought, using coatings that absorb water from the soil."


Coated seeds may enable agriculture on marginal lands | MIT News: Seed coatings developed at MIT could enable agriculture on marginal lands where the soil is too salty to support the growth of untreated seeds.