Phosphorus, the vastly underappreciated 15 th element on the periodic table, is essential to all life as we know it. Phosphorus is the structural backbone of the phosphate nucleotides in DNA and RNA, ...

Using first-principles calculations, a research group led by Prof. WANG Xianlong from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that phosphorus doping is an ...

Most phosphorus in the environment is in an organic form that plants cannot directly use, and traditional understanding suggested only enzymes could convert it into the bioavailable inorganic form.

Iron oxide in soil performs the same transformation as plants and microbes that are known to secrete enzymes to transform organic phosphorus into bioavailable inorganic phosphorus. Northwestern ...