Fixed Nitrogen

Finally, the value of industrial nitrate to help feed the current world population and the environmental consequences of nitrate use in terms of pollution in waters and human health implications are discussed."--Jacket.

This book provides an introductory-level survey of biological nitrogen fixation, covering the role of the process in the global nitrogen cycle as well as its biochemistry, physiology, genetics, ecology, general biology and prospects for its future exploitation.

The present volume developed from a symposium entitled "Enhancing Biological Production of Ammonia From Atmospheric Nitrogen and Soil Nitrate" that was held at Lake Tahoe, California in June, 1980. The meeting was supported by the National Science Foundation, Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and by the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of California, Davis. A total of 99 scientists from 41 insti tutions participated. Plants capture solar energy in photosynthesis and use mineral nutrients to produce human food and fiber products. The extent to which such materials are removed from agricultural production sites represents a permanent drain of mineral nutrients. Some plants of agronomic importance such as alfalfa, soybean, and clover associate with soil bacteria and use photosynthetic energy to reduce N2 to NH3. Many other free-living bacteria and some symbioses involving procaryotes and eucaryotes also reduce N2. Such processes repre sent one natural mechanism by which Man can augment soil N for agronomic purposes without using fossil fuel to synthesize and distribute N fertilizer. Other metabolic conversions in the N cycle and physical leaching processes remove N made available through N2 fixation. Thus nitrification, denitrification, and utilization of soil N by plants are processes that must be con sidered if one is to conserve N captured by N2 fixation. The meeting at Lake Tahoe united scientists from many disci plines to review the literature and to discuss current research directed toward the goal stated in the symposium title.

In the very far future, when the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere has combined with the nitrogen . . . When the formerly life-giving seas are now formed of nitric acid . . . When the very atmosphere itself is corrosive and lethal . . . Humanity must adapt . . . or perish!