Symbiotic nitrogen fixation, the process whereby nitrogen-fixing bacteria enter into associations with plants, provides the major source of nitrogen for the biosphere. Nitrogenase, a bacterial enzyme, catalyzes the reduction of atmospheric dinitrogen to ammonium. In rhizobialeguminous plant symbioses, the current model of nitrogen transfer from the symbiotic form of the bacteria, called a bacteroid, to the plant is that nitrogenase-generated ammonia diffuses across the bacteroid membrane and is assimilated into amino acids outside of the bacteroid. We purified soybean nodule bacteroids by a procedure that removed contaminating plant proteins and found that alanine was the major nitrogencontaining compound excreted. Bacteroids incubated in the presence of 15 N 2 excreted alanine highly enriched in 15 N. The ammonium in these assays neither accumulated significantly nor was enriched in 15 N. The results demonstrate that a transport mechanism rather than diffusion functions at this critical step of nitrogen transfer from the bacteroids to the plant host. Alanine may serve only as a transport species, but this would permit physiological separation of the transport of fixed nitrogen from other nitrogen metabolic functions commonly mediated through glutamate.In 1956 (1), ammonium was shown to be the product of nitrogenase, the bacterial enzyme that reduces atmospheric dinitrogen. In free-living, nitrogen-fixing microorganisms, the nitrogenase-generated ammonium is assimilated into glutamate through the glutamine synthetase͞glutamate synthase pathway. Various transaminases utilize glutamate to generate all of the other amino acids, which are then used to synthesize proteins, nucleic acids and other nitrogen-containing molecules.In rhizobia-leguminous plant symbioses, the majority of the dinitrogen reduced by the microsymbionts, referred to as bacteroids, is transferred to the plant. Because the rhizobia are physically separated from the plant cytosol by a plant-derived symbiosome membrane, the ammonium must move across the bacteroid and symbiosome membranes. The ammonia diffusion hypothesis has been the prevalent model surmising the initial steps of leguminous nodule nitrogen transfer. In this model, the product of nitrogenase exists in two forms within the cell, ammonium [NH 4 ϩ ] and ammonia [NH 3 ], which are readily interconvertible. The ammonium ion cannot diffuse across membranes, but ammonia is believed to diffuse freely out of the bacteroid. Once outside the bacteroid but within the symbiosome space, the ammonia may either diffuse or be transported across the symbiosome membrane (2) where it is assimilated by the host plant into glutamate by the concerted action of glutamine synthetase and glutamate synthase. Glutamate serves as the central nitrogen metabolite in the plant nodule cells for the synthesis of the other amino acids, nucleic acids, and other nitrogen-containing compounds such as ureides that are the principal nitrogen compounds transported from the nodules to the plant shoots and leaves o...
