The CO2 Removal on a Planetary Scale (CRoPS) program at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies is developing crops to sequester carbon.
"Six years ago, all the professors in plant biology at the Salk Institute decided we wanted to work on climate change because we thought that was the biggest problem that we currently face," Wolfgang Busch, executive director of Harnessing Plants Initiative at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, says. "We obviously knew that plants are great at capturing carbon dioxide from the air through the process of photosynthesis and we started to think [about] what we could change in plants to make them better at storing more of this captured carbon dioxide for longer."
With modern genetic technologies, the team at the Salk Institute knew that they could alter plant traits that would allow them to alter how carbon is stored. They chose the root system because if they increase carbon in the root, it could be transferred to the soil and held longer out of the atmosphere.
"Over time, plants have built a carbon reservoir in the soil that is two to three times bigger than the entire carbon store in the atmosphere," Busch says. Studies showed that carbon in root material is five times more likely to stay in the soil than carbon derived from the shoot or leaves.
Read more at seedworld.com