A Danish-German research collaboration may have found a solution to the large climate impact from the world's rice production: By adding electric conductive cable bacteria to soil with rice plants, they could reduce methane emissions by more than 90%.
A Danish-German research collaboration may have found a solution to the large climate impact from the world's rice production: By adding electric conductive cable bacteria to soil with rice plants, they could reduce methane emissions by more than 90%.
Half of world´s population is nourished by rice crops, but rice cultivation is harsh to he climate. The rice fields account for five percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas methane, which is 25 times stronger than CO2.
This is because the rice plants grow in water. When the fields are flooded, the soil becomes poor in oxygen, creating the right conditions for microorganisms to produce methane.
Now researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Duisburg-Essen have found that cable bacteria could be an important part of the solution. In the laboratory, they have grown rice in soil with and without cable bacteria and measured what happened.
“And the difference was far beyond my expectations. The pots with cable bacteria emitted 93% less methane than the pots without cable bacteria, ”says Vincent Valentin Scholz, who conducted the experiments as a PhD student at the Center for Electromicrobiology (CEM) at Aarhus University.
Read more at Aarhus University
Photo: Microscopy of cable bacteria in a lake. Photo: Yuri Gorby and Nils Risgaard-Petersen
