A seagrass harbours a nitrogen-fixing bacterial partner

Capone, Douglas G.

doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02956-y

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03 November 2021

A seagrass harbours a nitrogen-fixing bacterial partner

How underwater seagrasses obtain the nitrogen they need has been unclear. Evidence has now emerged of a partnership with a bacterium that might be analogous to the system used by many land plants to gain nitrogen.

Douglas G. Capone ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3968-736X ⁰

Douglas G. Capone
1. Douglas G. Capone is in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.
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Seagrass meadows are a prominent feature of many shallow coastal areas of the temperate through to the tropical ocean. Seagrasses provide a crucial habitat for invertebrates and juvenile fish, stabilize sediments and buffer the shoreline against erosion¹. Moreover, they contribute directly and positively to the ‘blue economy’ of the oceans through their long-term storage of carbon². Lush and highly productive seagrass beds often thrive in nutrient-deficient waters, and attempts to solve the enigma of how they accomplish this feat have driven considerable research over the years. Writing in Nature, Mohr et al.³ provide crucial evidence indicating that the success of a seagrass called Posidonia oceanica (Fig. 1), which proliferates throughout the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea (and elsewhere), might be attributed to the development of a highly integrated partnership with a bacterium. This system is reminiscent of those found in some terrestrial plants.

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Nature 600, 42-43 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02956-y

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