By developing these characteristics in model plants like the feedstock crop Lotus japonicus and Arabidopsis, the weed that's the workhorse of plant biology, they will enable the plants to store massive amounts of carbon.
The Salk Institute’s plant biology team will focus on three ways to achieve this: Directly by increasing the amount of suberin in plants indirectly by identifying how plants can make more roots and by developing plants to grow their roots deeper.
By creating plants with larger and deeper root systems that produce more suberin, scientists could coax plants to sequester significantly greater amounts of carbon than they do now, and bury it in the ground for hundreds of years to come.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies - one of the top scientific institutions in the world - has a bold idea: what if scientists could coach plants to function at the level of Olympic athletes and reach their full carbon storage potential? The team plans to utilize a natural plant material-suberin, the compound of wine corks and cantaloupe rinds-which doesn’t decompose over time. Every day, through photosynthesis, they remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from our atmosphere and convert it into oxygen and biomass. Plants already exist everywhere in the world. Today, plants have the potential to save us from climate change caused by excess atmospheric CO2. While this future may feel seem bleak, there is an answer hiding in plain sight - in the biology of the plants that surround us. Since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been steeply increasing. We have no time to wait: the United Nations predicts that by 2030, rising global temperatures will be beyond our control. We are already spending billions of dollars on episodic disaster relief and will spend trillions more in coming decades if temperatures keep rising. We face the real possibility of widespread famine, water shortages, rising oceans, epidemic disease, increasingly frequent and violent mega-storms, habitat destruction and species loss. I have two children, so I want to leave the world a better place.”Ĭlimate change poses an immediate, existential threat to our future. As she puts it, “I’m trying to do something now for humankind, not just to please my brain or follow a scientific curiosity. This project marks the culmination of her career with an effort to save our planet. She has also been a mentor for a new generation of plant biologists. She is a member of numerous prestigious scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of London. Recognized as one of the greatest scientific innovators of our time, Joanne is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a 2018 Breakthrough Prize winner, as well as winner of the 2018 Gruber Genetics Prize. She has built a career at the forefront of plant biology and is known for her decades of research on the genetic pathways through which plants adapt to changing environments. Joanne Chory is the Director of the Plant Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.