 What the hell is a legume? Do you know? If not, you're in good company because this was the title of a song published by the Danish food administration and in the song You learned that legumes are for example beans or peas and lentils And they aren't only healthy, but actually really amazing because they need way less fertilizer than other crops like barley and wheat and Fertilizers are a huge problem More than 1% of the of the world's yearly energy consumption is only used to make nitrogen fertilizers And then we use way too much of them and they pollute our lakes and rivers So what can we learn from legumes? Well legumes work together with special bacteria that give them all the nitrogen they need and The bacteria live inside the roots in these small bumps that you can see here So now imagine barley could do the same we could save so much fertilizer But in order to engineer barley we first need to understand how legumes work together with a special bacteria and When I started my project, we knew that there are two types of proteins So big molecules in the roots that recognize the special bacteria But we didn't know how these two Proteins interact to tell the plant to make the bumps So to study that I took a small antibody and fused it to one of the proteins and then the antibody bound to the other protein and thereby we brought them really close together and Then suddenly the legumes started making these bumps although there were no bacteria around So then we knew the legume makes the bumps when the proteins come close together And then we could take that knowledge and look at barley and we found two barley proteins that could also tell the plant to make the bumps So now there's still a long way ahead of us before barley can survive without fertilizers and Engaged with these special bacteria, but we've really come a step closer So next time you pull a pea plant out of the ground and look at the roots and see these bumps I want you to remember that special bacteria live inside them that help the plant to survive without fertilizers and We can learn from that pea plant how to engineer other plants like barley so that they will also need less fertilizer in the future I Think pea plants and all legumes are really amazing, and I hope you do too now. Thank you very much