Probably not. It doesn't actually fix its own nitrogen. This corn has a bunch of roots that don't touch the ground. It then produces an environment in/on those roots that is conducive to the growth of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. This is very much not a case of having a couple genes that could be transferred to other plants.

To get modern corn to do this will probably require a lot of breeding to bring together and select for the traits of both varieties.

Thats interesting, grapevines are using same mechanism to get the nitrogen, but the real problem is that once you introduce artifical source of digestable version of nitrogen, plant decide that it is not worth of investing into this ecosystem and it gets addicted on this supply.

Maybe this is quite common trait in other plant species and it is just not propagated due to the availability of nitrogen?

Can you link to more info about grapes fixing nitrogen? I've never heard of that.

Seems like there are not that much information available in English. I am based in Europe and most of research I am familiar with comes from other languages sources (German, French).

I found one source that looks promissing, but I haven't really read it: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-015-0329-7

Long term for related grasses like sorghum I'd say yes but crops like cotton or potatoes I'm more doubtful. Other grasses such as rice or wheat I'm just not sure because they're so different.

> Long term for related grasses like sorghum

Would that include rice? That would make it an even bigger deal wouldn't it?

How important is nitrogen fixing in combating desertification and could discoveries like this ultimately help reverse it?

Are there any nitrogen fixing plants that live in water like rice? I have problems envisaging the biochemical processes there, but I don't know much about it in the first place.

Azolla (water fern / mosquito fern).

In fact, using Azolla as rice companion plant is a long-standing practice in China: after flooding, rice paddies are seeded with Azolla, it multiplies (very) rapidly covering the surface and suppressing weeds (Azolla mats are very dense so water weeds get little to no sun) then releases nitrogen for the rice plants when it dies and rots.

Oh wow that's very interesting, thanks!

I know that first attempts to make crops to produce nitrogenase date to eighties. The ferment doesn't like to work outside of bacteria.

I'm sure that agro people were working on this problem non-stop for decades.