Metal-organic shells just a few nanometers thick can protect microbes from heat and humidity. These coatings could be used to protect microbial fertilizers, which could replace agrochemicals in farming.
Chemical fertilizers based on ammonia have boosted crop yields globally for over a century, but their production releases large amounts of greenhouse gases, and their runoff causes environmental damage. Naturally occurring microbes can do many of the same functions for farmland, fixing nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus so that they can be taken up by plants, but supplementing these microbes in soil is no easy task.
“The problem is that in the soil natively, they live in a really complex community where they have protection and support from other microbes,” says Ariel Furst, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “Many of these, when you pull them out of that environment and grow them and formulate them for redelivery, don’t survive.”
Furst and her lab members at MIT have long been studying coatings to protect delicate microbes from dangerous conditions. They previously developed coatings that could protect anaerobic bacteria from oxygen exposure during freeze-drying, an effort to make better, more effective biotherapeutics for human health. But their main interest, Furst says, lies in bacteria for remediation...
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