Karsten Temme

That's a form that plants can't use, and so they've partnered with microbes on a process called nitrogen fixation.

The microbes can breathe in that nitrogen gas and turn it into a form that plants can metabolize.

It's a symbiosis, a partnership that's worked for millions of years, right up until the point that humans started breeding crops to be more productive.

Those bigger yields needed more nutrients, and fertilizer was invented to fill the gap.

Well, microbes in response shut down that nitrogen-fixing function, putting those genes into hibernation.

What if we could wake them back up?

What if we could use modern tools like gene editing to bring those microbes back to being specialized helpers for farmers?

Then we could have a way for those microbes to live with the plant

alongside the roots, sensing the crop's nutrient needs and responding in real time.

Well, that's a challenge that I set out to pursue two decades ago, along with my friend, lab mate and co-founder Alvin.

We made it our mission to get those genes working again.

So here's how that went.

We collected soil samples from farms across the United States.

We extracted the microbes, we reprogrammed their DNA and we cranked that nitrogen-fixing function to 11.

Then one day in the lab, we saw there was a test tube with a tiny corn seed germinating.

Our microbes were living along the roots of that plant, producing nitrogen and sharing it with that tiny plant.

That test tube represented a breakthrough.

We had shown that we could create microbes that could sense and respond to the plant's nutrient needs in real time.

We thought we had just solved agriculture.

Well, spoiler alert, not quite.