GoKawiilNitrogen is indispensable for plant growth and underpins global agricultural productivity. Yet modern crops use nitrogen from fertilizers strikingly inefficiently. In maize (Zea mays, also known as corn), typically less than one-third of applied nitrogen is converted into biomass, with the remainder lost to the environment, imposing economic costs and driving ecological damage1,2. Improving nitrogen-use efficiency is therefore a central goal in sustainable agriculture. Decades of research have led to the discovery of the enzymes responsible for nitrogen assimilation3,4 — the conversion of environmental nitrogen into useful organic substances such as amino acids — but not much is known about how this process is spatially organized in plant cells. Writing in Nature, Chen et al.5 reveal an unexpected mode of organization.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01583-9
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Competing Interests The authors declare no competing interests.
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