Abstract

All plants need nitrogen to grow. Farmers use chemical fertilizers to add nitrogen to the soil. But this creates a lot of problems for the environment. So, scientists have been working on alternative ways to get nitrogen to their plants. 

We found a way to edit the DNA of rice plants so that they produce a compound that helps the formation of bacterial biofilms in the soil. These bacterial biofilms are very important to plants. They help them to absorb more nitrogen from the air. The edited rice plants in our experiment did grow better!