{"id":106035,"date":"2025-05-16T10:34:14","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T10:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/106035\/"},"modified":"2025-05-16T10:34:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T10:34:14","slug":"artificial-intelligence-helps-uncover-the-genetics-behind-corns-nitrogen-use-efficiency-study-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/106035\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial Intelligence Helps Uncover the Genetics Behind Corn\u2019s Nitrogen Use Efficiency, Study Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

NYU research could help farmers cut fertilizer costs and reduce environmental harm<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

New research from New York University<\/a> offers a promising path to growing corn with less fertilizer \u2014 using artificial intelligence to pinpoint genes that make plants more efficient at using nitrogen.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy identifying genes-of-importance to nitrogen utilization, we can select for or even modify certain genes to enhance nitrogen use efficiency in major U.S. crops like corn,\u201d said Gloria Coruzzi, senior author and Carroll & Milton Petrie Professor in NYU\u2019s Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology.<\/p>\n

The study, published in The Plant Cell<\/a>, outlines how NYU scientists combined plant genetics and machine learning to discover groups of genes \u2014 called \u201cregulons\u201d\u2014that help control how well corn uses nitrogen.<\/p>\n

Fertilizer has been essential to growing higher-yielding crops over the past 50 years. But up to 45% of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to fields goes unused, seeping into groundwater or turning into nitrous oxide \u2014 a greenhouse gas 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n

Corn, the top crop in the U.S., consumes large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer. Yet its low nitrogen use efficiency creates both economic and environmental costs.<\/p>\n

To improve this, NYU researchers trained AI models to find patterns in how genes respond to nitrogen in both corn and Arabidopsis, a model plant commonly used in genetic research. They discovered sets of nitrogen-responsive genes and the transcription factors that regulate them \u2014 essentially building a map of how nitrogen efficiency is genetically controlled.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe showed that traits like nitrogen use efficiency or photosynthesis are never controlled by a single gene,\u201d said Coruzzi. \u201cThe beauty of machine learning is it learns which sets of genes collectively drive a trait \u2014 and identifies the factors that regulate those sets.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers validated their machine learning predictions through lab studies, confirming two transcription factors in corn \u2014 ZmMYB34 and R3 \u2014 and one in Arabidopsis \u2014 AtDIV1 \u2014 regulate genes responsible for nitrogen use. Feeding this data back into the AI model improved its ability to predict nitrogen efficiency across different field-grown corn varieties.<\/p>\n

This knowledge could speed up crop improvement. Instead of waiting to see how corn hybrids perform in the field, researchers can now screen seedlings for key gene expression levels and select those with higher nitrogen use efficiency.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will not only result in a cost savings for farmers,\u201d said Coruzzi, \u201cbut also reduce the harmful effects of nitrogen pollution of groundwaters and nitrous oxide greenhouse gas emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo caption: Corn growing in the Irene Rose Sohn Zegar Memorial Greenhouse at NYU\u2019s Center for Genomics and Systems Biology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NYU research could help farmers cut fertilizer costs and reduce environmental harm. New research from New York University…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3846],"tags":[48623,267,12,2343,70,48624,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-106035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-featured-u-s","9":"tag-genetics","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-research","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-seed-world-u-s","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114517066998138499","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}