This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Plants need three things to grow, air, water, and nutrients.

Farmers usually take care of the last bit by fertilizing their fields,

but now scientists have found a type of corn that seems to thrive on air and water alone.

This has been sort of the holy grail, you know, if only I could grow corn and not put 200 pounds of

nitrogen on it.

Alan Van Dyens is a plant breeder at the University of California Davis and part of a team

that analyzed this one corn's unusual ability.

The corn variety hails from

Wahaka Mexico where it typically grows in nitrogen poor soils. Nitrogen is

needed for proteins, DNA, and the chlorophyll that lets plants perform

photosynthesis.

But the wahaken corn does well despite the bad soil and with little or no fertilization.

The plants pull off this trick with thick red aerial roots that protrude from the stem above the ground and

ooze out a clear goo packed with sugars. That slime is the perfect habitat for nitrogen-fixing

bacteria, a sugar-rich, oxygen-poor environment where the microbes

transform nitrogen gas into a soluble form the corn plant can use.

It's an above-ground version of the nitrogen fixation you might usually think of as happening

in the underground roots of legumes, like peas or beans.

The researchers demonstrated the corn plant's talents by exposing them to labeled isotopes of nitrogen and they were able to

track the movement of the distinctly identifiable nitrogen atoms from the air to the

root and into the plant. This pathway allows the corn to obtain up to 80% of its

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