The discovery by UC Santa Cruz researchers of a new organelle within single-celled algae that converts nitrogen gas into ammonia continues to be celebrated by the science community, this time by winning the 2025 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize.
The prize is the oldest one awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and goes to the paper deemed by a deciding committee to be the most outstanding among all the ones published in the "Research Articles" or "Reports" sections of Science in a given year.
The winning paper, “Nitrogen-fixing organelle in a marine alga,” was published in Science on April 12, 2024, and led by postdoctoral scholar Tyler Coale in the lab of Jonathan Zehr, distinguished professor of ocean sciences. The paper recently made Science's annual roundup of 2024's top breakthroughs and was widely covered in the global press over the course of last year.
As described in today's AAAS announcement, the paper explains how the "conversion of nitrogen gas into ammonia helps the algae survive in the nutrient-poor ocean. The cellular structure is derived from another microbe that the algae has incorporated. The researchers’ discovery fundamentally expands our understanding of cell biology by providing insight into the evolution of organelles, a process that was pivotal in the evolution of complex life and has likely only occurred a handful of times in biology."
In the paper, the researchers call the nitrogen-fixing organelle a "nitroplast." The work was led by Coale and Zehr at UC Santa Cruz, and Valentina Loconte and Carolyn Larabell, both affiliated with UC San Francisco and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Zehr and Kendra Turk-Kubo, assistant professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz and a co-author on the paper as well, will continue to conduct research on this discovery.
Zehr noted that early work related to this discovery was funded by the National Science Foundation. The most recent support was provided by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and several sizeable Simons Foundation grants.
Recipients of the Newcomb Cleveland Prize collectively receive $25,000, and all of this year's award winners will be recognized at the 2025 AAAS Annual Meeting later this week, where they will be honored with a tribute video and award ceremony on Friday.
Other institutions represented by their collaborators include National Taiwan Ocean University and Kochi University.
