The Haber-Bosch course of, which converts atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, revolutionized agriculture and helped feed the world’s rising inhabitants, nevertheless it additionally created big environmental issues. It is without doubt one of the most energy-intensive chemical processes on the planet, liable for 1-2 % of world vitality consumption. It additionally releases nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gasoline that harms the ozone layer. Extra nitrogen additionally routinely runs off farms into waterways, harming marine life and polluting groundwater.
Rather than artificial fertilizer, Pivot Bio has engineered nitrogen-producing microbes to make farming extra sustainable. The corporate, which was co-founded by Professor Chris Voigt, Karsten Temme, and Alvin Tamsir, has engineered its microbes to develop on plant roots, the place they feed on the foundation’s sugars and exactly ship nitrogen in return.
Pivot’s microbial colonies develop with the plant and produce extra nitrogen at precisely the time the plant wants it, minimizing nitrogen runoff.
“The best way we have now delivered vitamins to help plant progress traditionally is fertilizer, however that’s an inefficient technique to get all of the vitamins you want,” says Temme, Pivot’s chief innovation officer. “Now we have the flexibility now to assist farmers be extra environment friendly and productive with microbes.”
Farmers can exchange as much as 40 kilos per acre of conventional nitrogen with Pivot’s product, which quantities to a few quarter of the full nitrogen wanted for a crop like corn.
Pivot’s merchandise are already getting used to develop corn, wheat, barley, oats, and different grains throughout thousands and thousands of acres of American farmland, eliminating tons of of 1000’s of tons of CO2 equal within the course of. The corporate’s affect is much more placing given its unlikely origins, which hint again to one of the vital difficult instances of Voigt’s profession.
A Pivot from despair
The start of each school member’s profession is usually a sink-or-swim second, and by Voigt’s personal account, he was drowning. As a freshly minted assistant professor on the College of California at San Francisco, Voigt was struggling to face up his lab, appeal to funding, and get experiments began.
Round 2008, Voigt joined a analysis group out of the College of California at Berkeley that was writing a grant proposal centered on photovoltaic supplies. His preliminary function was minor, however a senior researcher pulled out of the group per week earlier than the proposal needed to be submitted, so Voigt stepped up.
“I stated ‘I’ll end this part in per week,’” Voigt remembers. “It was my huge probability.”
For the proposal, Voigt detailed an bold plan to rearrange the genetics of biologic photosynthetic programs to make them extra environment friendly. He barely submitted it in time.
A couple of months glided by, then the proposal opinions lastly got here again. Voigt hurried to the assembly with a number of the most senior researchers at UC Berkeley to debate the responses.
“My a part of the proposal received utterly slammed,” Voigt says. “There have been one thing like 15 opinions on it — they have been longer than the precise grant — and it’s only one after one other tearing into my proposal. All probably the most well-known persons are on this assembly, future vitality secretaries, future leaders of the college, and it was completely embarrassing. After that assembly, I used to be contemplating leaving academia.”
A couple of discouraging months later, Voigt received a name from Paul Ludden, the dean of the Faculty of Science at UC Berkeley. He wished to speak.
“As I stroll into Paul’s workplace, he’s studying my proposal,” Voigt remembers. “He sits me down and says, ‘All people’s telling me how horrible that is.’ I’m pondering, ‘Oh my God.’ However then he says, ‘I feel there’s one thing right here. Your concept is nice, you simply picked the unsuitable system.’”
Ludden went on to clarify to Voigt that he ought to apply his gene-swapping concept to nitrogen fixation. He even provided to ship Voigt a postdoc from his lab, Dehua Zhao, to assist. Voigt paired Zhao with Temme, and certain sufficient, the ensuing 2011 paper of their work was well-received by the nitrogen fixation group.
“Nitrogen fixation has been a holy grail for scientists, agronomists, and farmers for nearly a century, ever since anyone found the primary microbe that may repair nitrogen for legumes like soybeans,” Temme says. “All people at all times stated that sometime we’ll have the ability to do that for the cereal crops. The thrill with Pivot was that is the primary time that know-how turned accessible.”
Voigt had moved to MIT in 2010. When the paper got here out, he based Pivot Bio with Temme and one other Berkeley researcher, Alvin Tamsir. Since then, Voigt, who’s the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor at MIT and the pinnacle of the Division of Organic Engineering, has continued collaborating with Pivot on issues like rising nitrogen manufacturing, making strains extra steady, and making them inducible to completely different alerts from the plant. Pivot has licensed know-how from MIT, and the analysis has additionally obtained help from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Methods Lab (J-WAFS).
Pivot’s first targets have been to realize regulatory approval and show themselves within the market. To achieve approval within the U.S., Pivot’s staff centered on utilizing DNA from throughout the similar organism moderately than bringing in completely new DNA, which simplified the approval course of. It additionally partnered with impartial corn seed sellers to get its product to farms. Early deployments occurred in 2019.
Farmers apply Pivot’s product at planting, both as a liquid that will get sprayed on the soil or as a dry powder that’s rehydrated and utilized to the seeds as a coating. The microbes reside on the floor of the rising root system, consuming plant sugars and releasing nitrogen all through the plant’s life cycle.
“As we speak, our microbes colonize only a fraction of the full sugars offered by the plant,” Temme explains. “They’re additionally sharing ammonia with the plant, and all of these issues are only a portion of what’s attainable technically. Our staff is at all times attempting to determine the way to make these microbes extra environment friendly at getting the vitality they should develop or at fixing nitrogen and sharing it with the crop.”
In 2023, Pivot began the N-Ovator program to attach corporations with growers who apply sustainable farming utilizing Pivot’s microbial nitrogen. By way of this system, corporations purchase nitrogen credit and farmers can receives a commission by verifying their practices. This system was named one of many Innovations of the Yr by Time Journal final yr and has paid out thousands and thousands of {dollars} to farmers up to now.
Microbial nitrogen and past
Pivot is at present promoting to farmers throughout the U.S. and dealing with smallholder farmers in Kenya. It’s additionally hoping to realize approval for its microbial answer in Brazil and Canada, which it hopes can be its subsequent markets.
“How can we get the economics to make sense for everyone — the farmers, our companions, and the corporate?” Temme says of Pivot’s mission. “As a result of this really is usually a deflationary know-how that upends the very costly conventional approach of constructing fertilizer.”
Pivot’s staff can also be extending the product to cotton, and Temme says microbes is usually a nitrogen supply for any kind of plant on the planet. Additional down the road, the corporate believes it could actually assist farmers with different vitamins important to assist their crops develop.
“Now that we’ve established our know-how, how can Pivot assist farmers overcome all the opposite limitations they face with crop vitamins to maximise yields?” Temme asks. “That actually begins to alter the best way a farmer thinks about managing all the acre from a value, productiveness, and sustainability perspective.”
