The opportunity

Arable crops occupy about 1.7 billion hectares of the world’s land surface. Such a vast area provides an exceptional opportunity for drawing CO₂ out of the atmosphere. But what if we make this more efficient and ensure the carbon is stored for longer?

Modern agronomic methods like no-till have reversed some losses of carbon from soils but once plants decompose, how do we retain more carbon for the long term in the soil?

Because agricultural land is planted annually it provides significant potential for relatively rapid implementation of new plant varieties that have been produced by selective breeding and this provides an opportunity to engineer varieties that absorb CO₂ faster and decompose more slowly therefore retaining more carbon in the soil.

“About half of the carbon removed from the atmosphere by our crops remains in and on the soil after harvest, for example, the roots and straw of a cereal. But most of this returns to the atmosphere as these residues decompose. Using computational design we are identifying novel targets to modify by DNA editing to allow plants to draw more CO₂ from the atmosphere and place it into residues designed to be far more resilient to decomposition in the soil.

A successful test-of-concept will identify technologies that would make croplands strong net CO₂ sinks to counteract climate change and would be rapidly scalable”

Professor Stephen Long - Ikenberry University Chair of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences, University of Illinois

Professor Stephen Long – Ikenberry University Chair of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences, University of Illinois

The science

This project will take two approaches to carbon removal, utilising the ground-breaking technological advances in DNA editing (CRISPR-Cas) to enhance natural sequestration. Firstly, the team will focus on engineering increased photosynthesis in plants to increase biomass and secondly on changing the biological composition of residue, particularly roots, to be less easily degraded (known as recalcitrance).

The research team has already demonstrated engineered improvements of photosynthesis which result in substantial increases in CO₂ absorption and productivity. It will now seek to advance these in combination with engineering of metabolic pathways to produce plant residue resistant to decomposition.

With the pathways the project is proposing to engineer being common to most plants, this approach would have applicability to global agriculture, forestry and other perennial systems.

The potential impact

Today four major crops (maize, rice, soy and wheat) account for the majority of land use for agricultural crops with about 50% of the above-ground biomass harvested as grain or seed, while the remaining 50% – stem, leaves and other waste – remains on the field, and may be incorporated into the soil by minimal till.

A further significant fraction of biomass is in the root which remains within the soil. It is estimated that the total potential above and below ground biomass could amount to 6.8 Gt CO₂ equivalent for just these four crops. For comparison, total emissions in the US in 2021 was over 5 Gt.This project is not only identifying a way of keeping substantially more of this carbon stored in soils but as the team are only editing single pieces of DNA, importantly the plant varieties will meet regulatory policies in countries where scale up opportunities are significant. Furthermore, there is potential for this to be rolled out on a global scale within the next two decades.

The research team

This research, led by a consortium of leading international scientists in the UK and US, leverages and builds on 13 years of successful collaborative research focused on understanding and engineering enhanced CO₂ fixation. Together, their efforts have led to significant advances in our basic understanding of the pyrenoid-based CO₂ -concentrating mechanism (CCM), early successes in expressing algal components in higher plants, and recently, a predictive model of the CCM.

Professor Stephen Long - Ikenberry University Chair of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences, University of Illinois

Professor Stephen Long, Ikenberry University Chair of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences, University of Illinois

Professor Stephen Long has led major multi-institutional research projects, including the Gates Foundation Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project. His research has increased our understanding of how global climate change is affecting plants and how photosynthetic efficiency may be improved to affect sustainable yield increase. His lab demonstrated the first designed multi-gene transformation that increased photosynthetic efficiency and yield in the field. His mathematical modeling and in silico representation of the entire process has been key to identifying bottlenecks that could be addressed, and in some cases have been addressed, by genetic engineering.

Professor Long directs the Crop Transformation Facility of the University of Illinois Research Park, that robotically builds DNA constructs and transforms these into soybean and tobacco.

He has considerable experience, working with technology transfer, in patenting his co-inventions on improving photosynthesis and processing biomass. He has worked with companies on transfer of technologies, both for-profit (e.g. BP plc) and not-for-profit (e.g. Gates Agricultural Innovations), as well as on policy issues with the Royal Society and National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Megan Matthews - Co-PI Assistant

Co-PI Assistant Professor Megan Matthews has led work on modelling and in silico redirection of metabolism to alter plant cell wall composition to alter degradability. This in turn guided engineering of plants to alter the degradability of their biomass, within a team context. This work produced biomass that was more easily degradable for the cellulosic biofuel industry. This skill will now be applied to predict and then test the redirection necessary to produce the converse, creating more recalcitrant biomass.

“Photosynthesis is the most known process in plants but it is still a complex process and highly inefficient. In fact in most plants only 1-2% of light is converted into energy that the plant, and therefore people, can use. This provides a large window of opportunity to use computer modelling to not only identify approaches to boost this process, and therefore the carbon captured from the atmosphere, but to combine this with altering cell wall characteristics to increase carbon storage.

In the face of the dual challenges of global warming combined with the growing demand for food, the fact that refining this biological process holds the answer to both improving crop performance whilst reducing CO₂ at scale cannot be ignored.”

Professor Megan Matthews - Co-PI Assistant

Assistant Professor Megan Matthews – University of Illinois

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