July: Glasshouses and pots
Published on: 29 July 2025
Glasshouses and Pots
As he continues the quest to fix nitrogen in non-legume crops, Dr Mike Thomas says it’s all about the glasshouse and pot trials right now.
Having selected the first group of potential candidates from our strain library, we’ve put them into trials to see how they perform.
The aim of the pot trial is to generate a snapshot of everything that’s happening, so we can see what responses the different inputs are eliciting.
For example, we’ll be looking at tiller numbers, whether the plant reaches a particular growth stage any faster, how well and how quickly it establishes, and so on. These metrics will, at a later date, also feed into our general knowledge of how to measure and quantify what rates as a ‘good’ response.
Other metrics we will record include (as far as is possible, at this small-scale level) the yield response, as well as measuring nitrogen content in the plant tissue.
Later in the summer we’ll return to the strain library for further selection. We hope to identify another 50 or 60 candidates for this next stage; all of these will then go through an ammonia excretion screen (we talked about this in a previous newsletter) so that we can pick out the most promising candidates for further trials and testing.
Excitingly, we’re also making the necessary preparations – including finding pilot plots – to get autumn trial work underway in Africa, using the first group of microbial candidates. To have reached this stage as we approach the first anniversary of the project is extremely satisfying.