Removing the nitrogen bottleneck in the world's food supply

A University of Hawaii at Mnoa researcher is part of a team that developed a synthetic way to transform nitrogen into a bioavailable form that could allow for the production of ammoniafertilizer at a much lower cost. Scientists say that creating enough bio available forms of nitrogen is one of the most important problems in the world.

UH Mnoa Department of Chemistry Professor Roger Cramer and 13 researchers from universities in Japan have developed a synthetic way to transform nitrogen into a bioavailable form. The research was published in a scientific journal.

Cramer said that the research is an essential step towards removing the nitrogen bottleneck on the food supply.

Cramer and his colleagues have shown that the iron atoms can capture a nitrogen molecule and create a bioavailable form of nitrogen under certain conditions.

The reduction of nitrogen to ammonia, a bioavailable form of nitrogen, is accomplished by the production of nitrogenases. There is a metal-sulfur-carbon cluster and sulfur-surrounded iron atoms in these Enzymes. Despite almost 50 years of research, synthetic metal-sulfur clusters have not been able to reduce nitrogen.

More information: Yasuhiro Ohki et al, Nitrogen reduction by the Fe sites of synthetic [Mo3S4Fe] cubes, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04848-1 Journal information: Nature