Tiny Quantum Dots Shed New Light on Nutrient Flow

Exactly how do nutrients such as nitrogen move through the environment? That’s a key question in ecology and environmental science. The answer may be clearer thanks to a new technique that uses the light from tiny quantum dots to trace the movement of such nutrients. The technique offers a way for microbial ecologists to watch nutrient flow in real time in the field and forge clearer connections between organisms and the ecological functions they serve.

Tracking the movement of nutrients in the real world is difficult. For example, some fungi help transfer nutrients from soil to the roots of plants; to study the process, researchers typically inject a tracer, such as radioactive carbon-14, into the soil and then take a soil sample back to the laboratory, where plant roots are teased out and analyzed to see where the tracer ends up. Root-associated fungi are typically too fine to be seen, so it’s been hard to pin down precisely which fungi are responsible for the nutrient transfer and how they work.

So microbial ecologists Matthew Whiteside and Kathleen Treseder, both of the University of California, Irvine, set out to find a way to see the nutrient flow in the soil itself. They attached nanometer-sized bits of semiconducting material called quantum dots to organic compounds. As the fungi take in the compounds, they also take in the attached dots, which light up like little light-emitting diodes when zapped with light from an ultraviolet laser. The researchers then imaged that light with a root-level camera. Images trace how the nutrients are consumed by the microscopic fungi and moved into the associated plant.