Is it possible to grow cereal crops without having to rely on energy-requiring commercial fertilizers? In a new study publishing August 7 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, researchers describe a newly identified corn variety which acquires nitrogen—an essential nutrient for plants—by feeding its sugars to beneficial bacteria, which can in turn take up nitrogen from the air and pass it back to the plant in a usable form. The variety of corn was initially observed in the 1980s by Howard-Yana Shapiro, now Chief Agricultural Officer at Mars, Incorporated, in a nitrogen-poor field near Oaxaca, Mexico. With the emergence of metagenomics in the mid-2000s, Mars, Incorporated and the University of California, Davis, partnered with the local indigenous community to investigate the corn. The research team was led by Alan Bennett and Allen van Deynze at UC Davis.