GM Poplars and Climate Change

GM Poplars and Climate Change

Subject: Environment

Section: Climate Change

Context: A forest of GM Poplars to beat climate change

More on the News:

• In a low-lying tract in the pine belt of southern Georgia in the US, an experiment is underway to use, for the first time, genetically modified (GM) poplar seedlings that will grow wood at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air.
• These poplars may be the first GM trees planted in the US outside of a research trial or a commercial fruit orchard.
• Just as the introduction of the “Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of GM food crops, the planters of the poplars hope to transform forestry.
• Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change. The four-year-old company has attracted an investment of 536 million.
• Living Carbon has yet to publish peer- reviewed papers; its only publicly reported results come from a greenhouse trial that lasted just a few months. These data have some experts intrigued, but stopping well short of a full endorsement.
• Biologists in Living Carbon’s lab tinkered with how trees conduct photosynthesis. While photosynthesis has profound impacts on the Earth, as a chemical process it is far from perfect. Numerous inefficiencies prevent plants from capturing and storing more than a small fraction of the solar energy that falls onto their leaves
• Those inefficiencies, among other factors, limit how fast trees and other plants grow, and how much carbon dioxide they soak up. Scientists have spent chromosomes decades trying to take over where evolution left off.
• Living Carbon’s research has been inspired by the work of University of Illinois geneticist Donald Ort, who announced in 2019 that he and his colleagues had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently. The researchers added genes from pumpkins and green algae to induce tobacco seedlings to recycle toxins produced as a photosynthesis byproduct into more sugars, producing plants that grew nearly
• 40% larger Living Carbon grew engineered poplars in pots, and reported in a non- peer reviewed paper last year that its tweaked poplars grew more than 50% faster than non-modified ones over five months in greenhouse
• The company’s researchers created the greenhouse-tested trees using a bacterium that splices foreign DNA into an- other organism’s genome. But for the trees they planted in Georgia, they turned to an older and cruder technique known as the gene gun method, which essentially blasts foreign genes into the trees.