Tile drainage is a common practice used in agricultural fields to remove excess water, but it also transports harmful nutrients into water bodies, contributing to algal blooms that deprive aquatic life of oxygen. Woodchip bioreactors are an efficient way to reduce nitrogen pollution by treating the water as it exits the field. However, these denitrifying bioreactors may leach phosphorus from the woodchips into the environment. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign evaluates data from 10 bioreactors in Illinois to determine whether they are a source of phosphorus pollution.

Organic matter helps soil lock in moisture, but exact mechanism was previously unclear. Scientists studied the process by mixing minerals with three types of sugar. Carbohydrates strengthened binding energy of water by five times. Findings could lead to drought-resistant soils or explain how water might persist on other planets.

To study growth-defence trade-offs in the context of metabolism in crops, scientists from the Universities of Potsdam and Erlangen, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, and the National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, have generated the genome-scale metabolic model potato-GEM. The first large-scale metabolic reconstruction of its kind presents a useful resource to breed plant varieties with improved stress tolerance and high yields in the future.