How CRISPR Rice Could Help Tackle Climate Change: Gene-Edited Rice Might Be Better at Trapping Carbon Dioxide
by Justine Calma (The Verge) Can gene-editing technology CRISPR create new crops that help fight climate change as they grow? That’s what a group of researchers hopes to do with $11 million in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The funding will go toward efforts to enhance plants — starting with rice — and soil so that they’re better at trapping carbon dioxide. The effort, which was announced last week, is being led by the Innovative Genomics Institute, which was founded by Nobel laureate and co-inventor of CRISPR Jennifer Doudna.
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Plants naturally take in a common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, during photosynthesis. Eventually, they transfer that carbon into the soil.
CRISPR can be used to make precise changes in a plant’s genome to produce desired traits. There are three targets for gene editing in IGI’s carbon removal mission. It starts with trying to make photosynthesis more efficient in plants so that they’re even better at capturing as much CO2 as possible. Second, IGI is interested in developing crops with longer roots. Plants transfer carbon into the soil through their roots (as well as from the rest of their bodies when they die). Longer roots can deposit the carbon deeper into the soil so that it isn’t so easily released into the atmosphere again. A similar effort to influence plants’ genes and develop crops with more robust roots is underway at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which received $30 million from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020.
That brings us to the third arm of IGI’s research: boosting the soil’s capacity to store, rather than release, greenhouse gasses.
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“Plants are already extremely efficient carbon fixing machines, resulting from millions of years of evolution, so I still remain to be convinced that CRISPR can do much to improve carbon sequestration at the scale we need,” César Terrer, an assistant professor at MIT who leads a lab focused on plant-soil interactions, writes to The Verge in an email.
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Rice cultivation is also a big culprit for methane emissions since soggy rice paddies are an ideal home for methane-producing microbes. IGI is working on this problem as well, again looking at altering roots and microbes in the soil.
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IGI’s work won’t stop with rice. Sorghum is another prime candidate for gene editing to boost carbon removal, according to Ringeisen (Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) executive director Brad Ringeisen). READ MORE
This CRISPR pioneer wants to capture more carbon with crops: New research at Jennifer Doudna’s institute aims to create faster-growing, carbon-hungry plants using the gene-editing tool. (MIT Technology Review)
