Researchers Reveal New Cellular Architecture That Could Revolutionize Farming

Researchers, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, discovered the “nitroplast,” the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle, or part of a cell, in a multicellular organism. The discovery could eventually eliminate the need to add fertilizer to crops, which currently costs U.S. farmers upwards of $35 million a year and contributes to water pollution.

This article was written by Elizabeth Jeffers and originally published by The National Science Foundation.

Finding the nitroplast paves the way for new biotechnology that would allow crops to convert nitrogen to a more useable form, an essential process for growth, without relying on external fertilizer, offering significant potential to advance the agriculture industry.

The team published its findings in a pivotal paper, which recently won the 2025 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize.

Researchers had long thought that only simple organisms like bacteria were able to convert nitrogen gas into a usable form like ammonia.

“Nitrogen fixation is fundamental to our existence,” said Jonathan Zehr, the lead researcher and professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz. For over three decades, often with NSF support, Zehr and collaborators have been studying nitrogen fixation in the ocean, where the process plays a key role in keeping the ocean fertile.

Unraveling mysterious DNA

During research cruises in the late 1990s, Zehr and his team repeatedly collected a mysterious fragment of DNA. Although it was all over the ocean, it did not seem to come from a known organism. The DNA fragment also had a superpower — it encodes a protein that can fix dinitrogen, the most abundant gas in the air.

“We did multiple experiments over the past couple of decades to figure out what it was and finally were able to get the genome sequence,” Zehr said. The sequence revealed that the fragment was missing essential genes, indicating that whatever the lifeform was, it was not capable of living independently. “This is when the findings became relevant beyond oceanography,” Zehr said.

The team, which included Zehr, postdoc Tyler Coale, doctoral student Esther Mak, Japanese paleontologist Kyoko Hagino, and UC Santa Cruz assistant professor Kendra Turk-Kubo, among others, eventually realized that the lifeform they had been studying was a newly discovered organelle — a specialized structure within a cell — belonging to a kind of algae.

They realized that the organelle started as a bacterium and over millions of years, the algae had incorporated the organelle into their cells, creating a mutually dependent relationship. A similar process gave rise to mitochondria approximately 1.5 billion years ago and chloroplasts about 2 billion years ago.

“This journey of discovery spanning almost three decades is a clear example of the unique benefits that NSF’s long-term investment in foundational research provides,” said Ricardo Letelier, an NSF program officer. “In this case, it led to a discovery that has the potential to revolutionize our food supply industry by reducing dependence on fertilizers.”