How are isotopes used in agriculture?
I don’t know much about this, but I’ll put down these suggestions and perhaps others can add to them. 13C has been widely used (ie sufficiently widely that I’ve heard of it) in plant physiology to study the carbon cycle and photosynthesis. If you put 13C into a particular sugar and you find it in starch, then you know that there is a pathway from that sugar to starch etc. Often when researchers study biochemistry they choose a radioactive isotope to ‘label’ the biochemical in which they are interested. Then you can measure the concentration by measuring the radiation, and even better you can trace where it has come from. (Biologists would have better examples.) As to agriculture, the link below reports the use of 15N to study root biomass and uptake, 13C for carbon exchange and 137Cs for studying soil redistribution. Return to top of page and menu What are the links between high energy particle physics and cosmology? Much astronomical evidence (particularly the galactic red shifts for
