CRISPR Crops: How Scientists are Using Genome Editing to Sequester Carbon

hello thanks to everyone for joining us for this webinar which is part of the institute for carbon removal on policy's ongoing webinar series on carbon dioxide removal issues my name is will burns and i'm the co-director of the institute the institute is a research center at american university in washington dc that focuses on issues of science law policy ethics and public engagement associated with emerging carbon removal approaches in the past few years there's been extensive discussion of the potential role of agriculture in enhancing uptake of carbon dioxide through so-called regenerative farming practices in today's webinar two experts from the innovative genomics institute a research consortium of the university of california at berkeley and the university of california at san francisco we'll discuss the potential role of genomic editing in potentially increasing the carbon uptake of crops as well as generating a uh host of co-benefits so at the outset i'd like to introduce our two speakers from igi uh first is dr brad ringeisen who is a physical chemist who holds a phd from the university of wisconsin at madison and is a pioneer in the field of live cell printing prior to joining the igi dr ringaisen served as director of the biological technologies office at the u.s defense advanced research products agency or darpa our second speaker will be dr melinda kligman dr kligman holds a phd from stanford university in the field of biology prior to joining igi she worked at the bill and melinda gates foundation where she was a fellow in global policy and advocacy advising on the use of genome editing in agriculture and human health in an earlier role at the u.s department of agriculture melinda served as a science advisor to the foreign agricultural service the structure of today's webinar will be interventions by each of the respective speakers followed by uh q a uh with our audience so i encourage audience members to begin to populate uh the q a section uh with questions as as they arise uh and with that i will now uh yield the floor to dr rin geisin thank you so much will and i'd like to thank the institute uh for the invitation to speak today as well um melinda and i are both really excited to be here to discuss some of the new things that uh the new research efforts that the innovative genomics institute is trying to bring to bear to solve probably what's the largest issue facing society right now which is the climate crisis and you don't have to look much further than the news it seems like it gets worse every summer uh it's it's happening again this year uh with floods and fires and you know this is something that we're tremendously passionate about at the igi and look i was at darpa it's one of the preeminent research organizations in the government the department of defense but i was really had a difficult time funding all of this amazing work and health and in sort of supporting the warfighter when i knew what biology could potentially do to help with the climate crisis and so when jennifer doudna interviewed me for this position about a year ago i decided now is the time that genomic technologies and bacteria and plants and crops have the ability to help solve and not be part of the problem but to help solve the climate crisis and that's really what melinda and i are here to talk about today so with that i'm excited to share with you if you go to the next slide i'm excited to share with you the igi mission um it's to bridge revolutionary genomic and genome editing tools that's the crispr cast molecules and and next generation molecules that you all hear about in the news and with the recent nobel prize and to bridge those tool development to affordable and accessible solutions and climate and health we have focus areas and sustainable agriculture and scalable climate solutions but we also do a tremendous amount of work on the health side with crispr based cures therapeutics and diagnostics as well as developing the next generation of of gene editing tools it doesn't just stop with crispr cast there's a tremendous new library now of tools that help researchers go in uh and essentially edit and change and manipulate uh you know replace genes regulate genes turn genes on turn genes off uh there really is just a tremendous amount of new research going on both in our institute and across the world but one of the things that makes the igi tremendously unique is that when jennifer founded this institute her goal was to be able to achieve equitable and affordable access to these genomic innovations she truly believes in her core that crispr cass and gene editing can help bring a better life to all those in the world that it's not just for those that can afford it that there are equitable and affordable access that these genomic technologies and genomic innovations can can provide so next slide so who is the igi i've mentioned jennifer a couple times jennifer doudna the winner of the 2020 nobel prize in chemistry for the discovery of crispr cas9 she is our founder and president of our governance board uh then there's myself as the executive director and mike bachchan the dean of biology at uc berkeley as the deputy director but we also have leaders in human health and sort of advancing genome engineering as well as climate and sustainable agriculture the list of names here alex marston theodore ernoff jill banfield ross wilson brian statskowicz these are all stars unto themselves i'm really honored to be able to work with each and every one of these people on a daily basis and not to mention um melinda who i feel lucky to have stolen from the gates uh the gates foundation um about six months ago and so this is the leadership team of the igi and we all are focusing towards that goal to both bring uh new cures to those that need them affordably but also to be able to bring genomic innovations in agriculture as well as soil and the environment to be able to help solve this climate crisis that we're all experiencing all right next slide so here's a slide that pretty much outlines what the igi is thinking about when we say our climate strategy its foundation is in living organisms these are organisms who have evolved over billions of years to be able to use all of the greenhouse gases that you all hear about not only co2 carbon dioxide but also methane also nitrous oxide those are the top three greenhouse gases there are biological organisms and biological mechanisms that can either uptake those gases or it can release those gases back into the environment and so because that's true we believe that gene editing and these organisms can be used to be able to manipulate those organisms to be able to soak up more carbon to be able to direct the flow of carbon deeper into the soil deeper into environments to be able to store that carbon safely not just safely but actually to the benefit of farmers and to the benefit of the environment because you could make more nutrient-rich soil that doesn't release greenhouse gases but captures those greenhouse gases and is able to increase the fertility and increase the yield of agricultural crops not to mention also potentially providing the economics of scale for carbon credits and such as well okay so we have centered this around two projects with the goals of reducing creating solutions to minimize greenhouse gas emissions again those greenhouse gas emissions now at least in natural settings like agricultural lands are produced by living organisms mostly living microbes and fungi and we believe we can use those organisms to reduce those greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining food food security restoring that's what i was mentioning about the increase in the carbon content the nitrogen content of soils we believe we can build soil carbon storage back to pre-modern agricultural levels we've been steadily depleting uh the carbon reserves in those soils which hurts everyone it hurts the environment it hurts the farmer we believe we can restore those levels and then finally revive we think we can enhance crop yields with accessible and affordable climate-friendly strategies our first two projects in this are first a pathway to the net zero farm and that's focused on both reducing the farmer inputs these are things like fertilization pesticide use irrigation each one of those comes with its own carbon footprint and in the case of fertilizer actually results in nitrous oxide emissions as well and so you get a doubly bad environmental hit when you over fertilize or when you when you use chemical fertilizers our second goal is to minimize those greenhouse gas emissions that are primarily coming from soil microorganisms but they release both methane and nitrous oxide and so that's the goal is to understand the complexities of that system and to try to minimize the emissions of these harmful greenhouse gases from natural environments and agricultural lands the second project is is called accelerating biological carbon capture and sequestration i'm feeling that's probably the one that's most interesting uh to this uh community but we really have three goals there is the first is to enhance carbon uptake via photosynthesis um really i'm not sure how much you all know about photosynthesis but there's really two primary components of photosynthesis there's the light reaction of photosynthesis and then there's the carbon capture and carbon fixation mechanism that's centered around the molecule rubisco we actually have partners on both sides of that house and we think we can edit crops to both enhance that photosystem as well as enhance the carbon capture and carbon concentrating mechanisms in the plant to increase photosynthetic yields maybe to 20 30 maybe even 50 over where they are today that would increase both biomass above ground to increase yields but also increase biomass below ground which could help store and push more carbon into the soil and the deeper you go in that soil the longer you're able to to keep that carbon stored deep in the soil the second goal is to redirect the biological carbon cycling in soil to promote geologic storage what you don't want with the biological mass biomass like the plant biomass or soil microorganisms when they die for that carbon to be released back into the atmosphere we think we can actually manipulate the pathways between the plant and the microbes to be able to encourage soil aggregation to be able to encourage the the types of microbes that utilize methane and utilize co2 directly to be able to pump more carbon for longer periods of time and the soil and then third there's actually an underutilized mechanism of carbon uptake that's actually non-photosynthetic microbes most people when they think about biological carbon capture focus solely on photosynthesis whether that's algae in the ocean or seaweed or whether it's photosynthesis from crops or grasslands those are all viable options but there's an untapped resource that's sitting below ground and that those are non-photosynthetic organisms that live in dark environments and they've evolved over time to actually utilize and uptake co2 and they do so um in some cases with even higher efficiencies than photosynthesis could ever achieve so we actually have professors that are looking at those specific mechanisms and looking for ways to be able to enhance those organisms and enhance the mechanisms of that non-photosynthetic process all right next slide so this is a summary of what we're talking about the goal is to reduce those farmer inputs that it reduces the carbon footprint of agricultural yields which produce something on the order of about 25 of the agriculture of the overall emissions um anthropogenic emissions um by by human activity um that's goal number one is to use microbiology and gene edited crops to be able to reduce those farmer inputs and also then reduce the emissions that i've been talking about so that's really the hope we've just started this work we're very very excited about the promise of the future of of this research all right next slide all right and then to summarize the second slide it really is looking at the carbon that's currently in the atmosphere and trying to push that carbon through plants through microbes and to try to capture it deeper into the soil and by doing that you're not not only increasing the carbon and the organic matter that's present in the soil but you're also um increasing the nitrogen content and then there's the potential to to um have uh uh sort of soil amendments as well as exudates that are coming out of the roots of the plants um and out of the the roots of the crops to be able to help sort of capture and agglomerate sort of the the carbon that is exuded and captured in the soil to be able to keep it for longer and longer periods of time and the deeper and deeper that soil goes whether it's deeper roots producing deeper roots producing more recalcitrant roots or working with those microorganisms that i talked about earlier that are non-photosynthetic that reside a meter or deeper into the soil that's where we really want to to take advantage of these microbes these understudied microbes that we think can sort of hold the key to be able to capture higher and higher concentrations of carbon in the soil and in the deep soil all right next slide all right yeah we can just go through all of that thank you all right so we have a couple early results here we have results where we think we can increase the crop photosynthesis we've engineered the the carbon concentrating light and and reaction pathways that's photosystem one photo system two and rubisco we feel like we can engineer those systems into plants together to be able to create a better photosynthesis and improve photosynthesis secondly we think we can look at these non-photosynthetic microbes professor jill banfield who's the director of microbiology for the igi has studied these soil microorganisms and has discovered an unprecedented diversity in this critical rubisco enzyme that's that carbon concentrating and carbon capture enzyme some say it's the most important protein in the world well jill and a professor named dave savage together feel like they can actually improve that rubisco molecule because there's such tremendous diversity uh out in nature and then finally we're working with a professor pam ronald at the uc davis um where she's looking at crop varieties rice varieties that have deeper and more dense roots and there's also professor patrick she who just joined the uc berkeley who thinks he can engineer the biopolymers that make up those roots to be able to make them more recalcitrant to break down to be able to store that carbon into the soil for longer periods of time all right next slide all right the last thing i wanted to talk about before passing it over to melinda is the prospects of using greenhouse gases and waste streams as feed stocks for ban biomanufacturing processes right now biomanufacturing is exploding you've probably heard of the bioeconomy organizations or companies like zymergen ginkgo they're they're just expanding exponentially trust me i've seen many of my ex darpa colleagues find homes uh up at ginkgo bioworks in boston recently it's because there's so much potential in biomanufacturing to make products in a much more carbon friendly way as well as in a in a more environmentally friendly way but one of the secrets to that manufacturing process right now is that it's run off of sugar pure sucrose and glucose um these things obviously have to come from relatively energy dependent and carbon intensive farming practices that as i just discussed in all the previous slides oftentimes are not very carbon friendly uh farming practices so we believe that there's a tremendous potential to directly utilize both methane and co2 to feed into bioreactors and directly use that as a feedstock or alternatively take waste solid wastes and biomasses and have microorganisms break down those and enzymes break down those more recalcitrant uh waste waste streams to be able to use that as a stepping stone to be able to create um both fuels and additives and building materials i funded a program when i was at darpa that was dealing with living cement it's actually cement that has living microbes in it that harvest and capture co2 out of the environment while the cement is curing right now current cement cures and releases greenhouse gases so wouldn't it be great to be able to expand that type of work where you're actually using it to build industrial materials or fuels and chemicals um in in this more uh environmentally and and climate friendly way so the concept is to create biomanufacturing that now consumes greenhouse gases rather than emits and and relies on very uh carbon unfriendly farming practices all right next slide and at the igi we've made some progress here dave savage who i mentioned earlier is actually engineered on e coli which is the normal biomanufacturing bug it's sort of like the workhorse microbe that all you know almost all in biomanufacturing uses well he's engineered this organism to actually directly use co2 gas rather than relying on glucose and and and sucrose so that's tremendously exciting i think that there's a huge amount of potential there to be able to follow up and and make that process even more efficient secondly we are sort of the gene editing institute and their new gene editors i mentioned these before that it's not just crispr cast nine which was sort of the again sort of the workhorse in the gene editing field but there's a new uh uh crispr cass uh three which is used to make very large deletions out of out of microbes and we have a a partner and a member at igi um that has created a way to be able to make very large these very large deletions and microbes to potentially be able to make organisms that have a very small genome that could run more efficiently in bioreactors they could consume less carbon and be able to create and convert more of that carbon directly into the products that we want to use through that by manufacturing process and then finally we have the opportunity to engineer and optimize the microbes that have naturally evolved to grow on greenhouse gases that's really moving beyond these workhorses like e coli and now trying to start to create new microbes that are new biomanufacturing processes and the breakthrough that we've got here is that we've made genome scale deletions in some non-traditional microbial chassis and i think this is a really exciting area i just attended a workshop this morning from my old office at darpa biological technologies office that's looking at harvesting rare earth metals rare earth elements using some of these non-traditional chassis and i think that there's real opportunity to sort of shift from very carbon intensive manufacturing to very carbon efficient manufacturing using some of these biological processes okay and i think that's the end of my presentation if we go to the next slide i think i'm going to pass it over to my my great colleague melinda kliekman thank you melinda thank you very much brad um so as the public impact director at the igi my team works on advancing public understanding of the benefits of genome editing and also making sure that those benefits are advanced in an equitable and ethical way i think as many of you listen to the presentations about the research you may have some questions about how such a powerful technology could impact society as well as the ethics and the public perception of doing so and these are all areas that my team investigates and tries actively to address so today i'll talk a little bit about regulations and how those play a role here as well as the public perception so as brad mentioned you know there's a significant amount of research that's ongoing in the lab but as you can imagine that is not the end of the story so there are many steps from getting a product from the lab into farmers fields and then to consumers most organizations follow some kind of a product development pipeline and at the very simplified level researchers identify and develop new improved approaches for tools so some of the new crispr cast systems like brad was mentioning and then they used those tools to identify new traits that are sources of things like stress tolerance quality or that can help with climate adaptation and then these traits are introduced into a breeding pipeline where we can integrate them into a high performing variety or something that's locally adapted that a farmer might want to grow and then from there things can change a lot depending on how the product is categorized so most of the times you'll want to do field trials to make sure that that product is um acting the way that you want it to act in the field but if your product is determined to be a gmo because you are changing the genes then you may be required to conduct a battery of tests um around product safety and put all that data together into quite a large dossier and then submit it to a regulatory agency and that is country by country depending on where you're trying to operate but with some genome edited products because they're so similar to conventionally bred products they are deemed unregulated in some countries and they're able to just go through the process like a conventionally bred product where you just scale it up and distribute it according to the appropriate channels within that country so the time and cost of all of this really depends on where you're located and a lot of that has to do with the regulatory requirements so since this is the carbon removal law and policy network we can talk a little bit about what kind of policies we're seeing globally for these new technologies um globally i think regulators have taken a fairly practical approach that is informed by years of experiences with transgenic or gmo plants i'll sort of use transgenic gmo and gm somewhat interchangeably but you know globally most regulators do not want to have to issue new laws it's difficult it can take a lot of time although some are doing so with for example india so what regulators have done instead is to interpret their existing laws to determine whether these new genome-edited products fall within the existing definition of a gmo or if it's excluded and can go through the pipeline as a conventionally spread product so most of the language in the existing laws makes reference to recombinant dna technology or a novel combination of genes as the regulatory trigger so with genome editing you can do things like make very targeted single point mutations or you can make deletions of sections of genes which silences them and makes them inactive or you can introduce genes from a sexually compatible relative but you can just do that in one generation instead of traditional cross breeding which can take many generations to get get to the thing that you are really looking for but all of those different processes single point mutations or deletions they happen frequently in nature and obviously sexual crossing can happen frequently in nature so countries are saying that if these products are similar to something you can get by conventional cross-breeding they're not going to regulate them under rules meant to provide oversight for biotechnology products um of course they're going to be subject to you know regular food safety laws like any product would be and this is also practical in a sense because if it could have occurred naturally then it's impossible to tell them apart from a naturally occurring variety and so regulators have no real way of enforcing requirements um and i would argue that that's just not the point of regulation if two things look the same one shouldn't be regulated differently from the other so as you can see from this map most of the countries in the in the americas have taken this approach um and several countries in asia and africa have either taken this approach or are considering similar approaches the one outlier has been the eu where a court case determined that genome-edited products fell within their definition of a gmo as was written in the law but earlier this year in april the food safety authority there said that their law is written is not fit for not fit for purpose and they're going to have to go back and update the language in that law um so the countries that haven't said anything yet most of them are just treating genome-edited products as being you know gmos until they can establish their laws but a big part of the impetus of why the eu is i'm doing what they're doing right now i think it's because they see they really see the benefits for climate change adaptation um especially in relation to their aggressive climate agenda and their farm to fork strategy that they're currently establishing so how big of a difference can this regulatory burden make so experts in the biotech industry estimates it takes about 14 years to commercialize a gm product anywhere from 25 million to 130 million about five years of that time is taken up just collecting the data for the regulatory dossiers submitting it and waiting for regulatory approvals i mean these same experts estimate a much reduced cost and time for genome-edited products at about five years and 10 million i think part of it has to do with the ease of breeding and then part of it has to do with the regulatory requirements and so all those estimations were made in 2018 2019 by several different companies so the question is you know is this what we are actually seeing in practice so in 2015 argentinian regulators really pioneered the model of how they're going to regulate these new breeding techniques they do it on a case-by-case approach they review the product determine whether it meets her definition of the gmo if it doesn't have a novel combination of genetic material then it's considered similar to a conventionally infrared product and so it's been six years so we have some data in 2020 the key regulators in that country published a paper summarizing what they had found thus far and it provides an early example of the impact of regulations on innovation so right now on the screen this on the top left you see the developer type that have submitted products the first approval was made in 1996 of a herbicide tolerant soybean and you can see from this graph that about 90 percent of the submissions were made by foreign multinational companies about 10 institutions um have submitted all of the gm products um in the last 23 years in argentina and if we compare that to genome-edited applications by developers we see a much more even distribution of who's submitting applications there have already been 13 different developers dominated by local companies and public research institutions and this is a comparison of you know 23 years to about a three year period and the same thing if we drop down and look by product type we can already see a much wider variety of products even in that shortened three year time period so what this highlights to me is you know things that people have been saying for a long time without a lot of concrete evidence it shows that the cost of regulation can really shrink the number of players that are able to operate and then even for those large multinational companies they're really limited in what they can develop because they only focus on crops that can be the most profitable because the regulatory burden is so high and i think there's a lot of calls by civil society organizations for increased regulations aimed explicitly at limiting the activity of multinational companies um the conversation has shifted away from safety to you know monocultures or the overuse of particular chemicals um but i think it actually has the opposite effect where the additional regulation regulation makes it so expensive and difficult that it's only the largest players working on a tiny fraction of crops traits that can have access and that actually ends up leading to consolidation and monocultures and if you lower the regulatory barrier you see a widening field of small companies local and public research institutions like our own and you see a wider range of product types so you might see things that are more consumer-facing or climate change-oriented instead of solely focusing on farmer profits um so i think that's all really interesting and i'm curious to see how it evolves in the future so then the last thing i'll talk about that might be of interest is just the public perception i think we can't really ignore this since it's part of the negative feedback loop at least around gm products and it leads to this high regulatory requirements and potentially consumer rejection in some places so it's a big concern and as scientists we want to appreciate it we want to address it where possible before products reach the market so to give you an example this paper by yang and hobbs in 2020 published a study on the perceptions of genetic modification and genome editing and people were asked to rate from one to six whether they thought these products um were natural safe um and ethical and on this graph on the y-axis we have a rating scale with one being not at all safe natural ethical and six being completely um the colors are you know the darkest blue for crossbred plants which i think is interesting that like traditional cross breeding didn't get closer to the six um and then the light blue is for mutagenesis where plants are irradiated with chemicals or radiation to generate random mutations that breeders can then select for and that's rated quite lowly across the board although it's been used for a long time and it's considered a conventional breeding technique that doesn't require further examination by regulatory agencies and then the horizontal hash lines are gm or transgenics and the hash lines at an angle are genome edits which get somewhat of an intermediary score here and then if we look across the published literature there hasn't been that much to date because genome editing is still fairly new um there are publications that look at the attitudes perceptions some have measured the willingness to buy and at what cost and some studies have looked across multiple countries so they it kind of highlights the perception differences across countries so i grossly oversimplified this to compare them roughly but the two plus signs um are a positive perception of the breeding technique a positive and a plus and minus sign is sort of a mixed perception or something intermediary from the highest and lowest scores and then the two negative signs in the key that consumers have a more negative association i think overall on the most basic level the research shows that consumers find cross-breeding to be the safest and they're more open to genome-edited products than gmos and then of course there's the interesting part of the mutagenesis that consumers rate even lower than gm um but one of these studies found that when consumers found out they'd already been eating products mutagenesis for many years it raised their perception of it and it also mattered to consumers who developed the products if it was a government or public sector developer they had more trust in that and that was preferred so i think it is important for us as scientists to think about the research and sit on it a little bit you know if we do things the way we've always done it so for instance some of these studies from france the consumers say we don't want anything new we don't want any changes at all um if we go that route then there's no innovation there's no progress and i think in the long term that's sub optimal for society but on the flip side we want to bring the public along in the process and make sure that the societal values are integrated into our research so a big part of that is having dialogue with stakeholders to really understand the nuances of their needs and perceptions the igi has conducted outreach we recently held a climate workshop in april of this year where we invited environmental nonprofits farmers civil society organizations governments and international organizations to start an early dialogue with us where we can share our approach before we're too far down the road and get honest feedback on the best ways for us to proceed we would like to innovate and we are innovating and lending our expertise towards solving the climate crisis but we also want to honor our shared values around environmental impacts and we believe that these dialogues go a really long way in improving the public perception since we want to act in a fashion that actually is worthy of trust and as an outcome of this meeting we also spoke with the us department of agriculture regarding their own climate agenda and they want to empower farmers to use tools at their disposal to reduce their carbon footprint and this is definitely some tools that could aid in that but we're all kind of trying to figure out how to make sure we can measure the carbon that is stored and for how long it's stored i think the policy makers of the usda signal that that is something that they're very much um working on right now so with that i will stop there and thank you all for your attention and i guess turn it back over to you for well for questions thank you very much uh melinda and uh thank you brad and um i will turn to the questions now uh uh brad's been uh kind enough to answer most of the questions in the interim but given the fact that many may not have seen those answers and i can never remember if they're captured in our recorded version i'm going to try to work through some of them so i apologize brad if you have no absolutely will and there might be follow-ups too from my from my uh answers so i'd love to have a discussion for sure that sounds great so the first couple of questions are are focused on the issues of permanence and recalcitrance both of which were discussed a bit already so the first question is will continued large-scale wildfires negate the potential to store significant carbon in new growth uh biomass yeah and i and my answer to that really agrees i mean this is a critical critical question and i think that it it goes towards a couple of the subsequent questions that were listed there as well is that permanency that that recalcitrant nature of the biomass and you don't have to look any further than the wildfires that are you know ravaging the the the west coast right now uh it's it's a big question now if you think about that in terms of agricultural because most of our work that we're going to be uh pursuing is an an agricultural lands and sort of increasing that agricultural biomass so the problem with agricultural biomass isn't probably as much a wildfire as it is with sort of the leftover biomass the waste biomass that's the roots that's the leaves that's the the part of the plants that don't uh that aren't really eaten or consumed for nutrition um that's where we think we can actually come and step in to be able to incorporate that biomass more completely into forms of carbon that persist for longer periods of time in the soil the added benefit of that is that it should be recalcitrant to things like fires and and uh tilling and like these practices that that oftentimes result in reductions and emissions of carbon and my subsequent answers uh to a lot of the questions after this sort of go into a little bit more detail about how we hope to try to do this so we'll maybe i'll just i'll just go a little bit through a couple of the approaches that we're thinking about so that'd be great look there's been some uh well-publicized work by joanne corey down at the salk institute that's looking at trying to create more recalcitrant roots thumbs up like that is fantastic that's the right approach we want to try to add on to that work a little bit for some of our work um we do believe that just one type of biopolymer i think they're pursuing suberin uh our approach might go a little bit beyond subaren that there's some reports that subarin can regardless of how it's engineered could still be broken down by sort of the complex microbial kind of inhabitants of soil so we want to try to create sort of a mesh network think of like a patchwork quilt of biopolymers um that i think might be able to interlock with each other a little bit to really create a much much more recalcitrant um form of biomass at least subterranean root biomass and so this is work that's being proposed by and and started by patrick she um at at uc berkeley um and he's looking at at things like sporopolymer which is has been shown through fossil records to exist in in nature for you know hundreds of thousands to millions of years i'm trying to combine that with some of the uh other natural polymers like subarin or or other uh and to create these networks of roots so that's one thing is to make more recalcitrant roots but in reality i don't i don't want to put all the eggs in that basket because if we create roots that don't biodegrade like that kind of sounds like plastic to me a little bit so i really want to try to focus a little bit on root exudates as well and root exudates are essentially the metabolites that sort of the carbon that comes out of the root systems that gets deposited into soil so you have all of the above ground biomass that's the that's the fruit and the and the cereals and the grains and things as well as the leaves and the stem of the biomass but then you have all of this carbon that gets deposited into the soil that essentially feeds the microbial biomass that's in the soil right now if it's just left uncontrolled the natural sort of circumstances of of carbon and the carbon evolution in that soil oftentimes that soil that carbon will be released as co2 or methane into the environment we think as we characterize all of the microbes that are present in soil we and we can start to understand the networks and the interconnectivity between those really complicated interactions between those soil microbes there's literally a billion microbes per cubic centimeter of soil so we're going to characterize all of those microbes do it at a genome scale so we understand the mechanisms the connections between the different carbon pathways and the carbon metabolites that are there that will inform how we could then edit crops to be able to sort of talk with those microbes through the funneling of these metabolites and exudates out of the roots and we think we can up regulate the microbes and and increase the population of the microbes that better fix carbon that increase the soil aggregation that has been shown to be able to extend the period of time that carbon is stored in the soil so that's a little bit of a nutshell of some of the things that i was saying but please do look at some of my answers where i i typed out in a little bit more detail some of the things that we're doing but we are not looking at just spraying microbes onto the soil that's not what we want to try to do we want to be able to increase the population of positive of beneficial microbes in the soil to be able to increase aggregation increase organic mineral associations and then be able to increase the root and the recalcitrantness of the roots and sort of the microbial networks that are in soil okay so those pre-existing things that are there uh we want to be able to sort of uh increase the populations of those not have to spray spray spread all right thank you for that brad we have a lot of other science oriented questions but i want to make sure we get a bit to the on the regulatory side too and i had a question for you melinda related to uh your interaction with usda and thinking about the the role of of genomics is as you acknowledge there's a lot of serious questions about being able to both monitor and quantify soil uh sequestration associated with various practices has your uh institute or the usda indicated that there may be some uh unique challenges in measuring uh soil sequestration associated with the uh techniques that you're uh contemplating using yeah i mean from our discussion with the usda it seemed like they were very much in the process of trying to figure out a path forward it did not seem like they quite had an answer to it yet i think one of the things that the secretary said was that he wanted farmers to think about profitability instead of just yields so think about the whole context including potentially subsidies um for sequestering carbon on their farms but beyond that we haven't seen anything from them so far on exactly how they would move that forward and then maybe i could throw it over to brad i don't know what we're doing in terms of thinking about measuring carbon sequestration in the soil yeah and that was one of the questions that was in the i was in the chat to melinda um look i mentioned uh one of the professors and and scientists that were working with jennifer pettridge she has a joint appointment between uc berkeley and lawrence livermore national lab she works closely with another professor named mary firestone and their work and they've published some of this is specifically looking at sort of the carbon residence times in soil they've done some really preeminent work in sugar cane and looking at sugar cane roots and root structures as well as root exudates where they're looking at what types of structures and associations and agglomerations in soil result in longer times of carbon storage and additionally also the depth into the soil makes a significant difference in how how long the carbon resides in the soil the deeper you are in the soil the longer that carbon is going to be able to persist so so those are the individuals that really are going to make those measurements and oftentimes uh what that what they do is create sort of an ecosystem in the laboratory where they can actually do isotope tracing and those isotopes then are the sort of the half-life of those isotopes can be used to try to understand sort of how long these agglomerations and sort of aggregations in the soil could potentially persist uh into the end of the future yeah but i think well on a on a broader scale i think this is something that the field as a whole is struggling with to do on any kind of a large scale like of course you can go into one particular farm and test but if you're going to deploy something across a huge scale and potentially provide subsidies for it then it starts to start to just become very challenging and i do think that nist may be able to play a role here the national national stan institute of standards and technology this seems like a role that nist might be able to play maybe to cross over and work with the usda a little bit or the doe to try to figure out measurement strategies and sort of quantitation and reproducibility of that i think there might be an opportunity will for you and your organization to maybe to reach out to some people at nist they might there may be some interest there yeah i think that's an interesting question i think as as is the case with a lot of these things there's a lot of siloing still right and a good thing to look at all right thank you very much for that both of you um the next question is more uh economic in orientation says the u.s government invested 100 million and failed biomass to fuel efforts in the 70s again in the 2000s 500 million and failed biomass to fuel research was funded in the current effort at using biological processes to utilize methane and co2 are they doomed to be another technical success but economic failure yeah that's a great question and again i these are great questions i couldn't agree i couldn't agree more look having been a guy that was responsible for a 300 million a year budget at darpa i am highly sensitive to the wasting of government funding um and look we need better strategies for uh how to to do to do an economically viable biomanufacturing process um and and so that's when when we devised this strategy that's the very first thing that came to our mind because we want to utilize waste what better to start with than waste and if you can if you can't make something economically viable out of a waste product whether that's a gas waste product or a waste stream of some sort brewery waste uh gas uh waste coming off of a of a steel factory uh you name it there's a bunch of different uh waste streams that could potentially be used that's the hope is that if you can make that viable if you can make turn that into a biomanufacturing process now you don't have to rely on pure forms of carbon like sugar and glucose sucrose and glute and glucose and at the same time you're using a feedstock that in most cases companies and the producers of that waste will literally either pay you or it will be free to you to start with and so that's the hope is that it potentially could be an economically source economically viable source but let me point out that a lot of what we're talking about is tremendously difficult the solubility of something like methane is tremendously low so how do you get that methane to make it biologically available to a microbe that's an unsolved problem that's something that's going to require basic research using new microbes that are not e coli or yeast to be out that are naturally evolved to be able to utilize things like co2 directly how do you make those at scale and be able to make those efficiently produce the chemicals and and manufacturing products that you need these are things that we're you know currently working on but it is it is tremendously difficult thank you for that um this is another question that's related to uh to the economics uh will credits to farmers be required as incentives to apply the techniques or will these modified crops and microbes be economically viable through things such as producing higher yields and lower fertilizer costs and thus not require subsidies i'm going to toss that one i mean i think you know the hope the hope and the plan is that you will have higher yields is that the soil will be more fertile um and that in and of itself should incentivize farmers to adopt these practices but again you know farmers can be a little bit risk-averse i mean their entire livelihoods depend on having a good yield and so trying out something so new which may also have some more longer-term benefits that might not be realized in just one cropping season you know it could require incentives at least at the beginning and it seems like at least our administration and i'm fairly sure the administration in the eu is really interested in anything that would help reduce the carbon footprint of agriculture because there's just not a lot of options available right now so i mean there are a lot of subsidies out there for other things that are not as sustainable or climate friendly so i think adding an incentive on top of it is never a bad thing if you're looking at increasing sustainability yeah got a kind of a follow-up question related to that you you showed us all the data melinda in terms of public attitudes toward various approaches have there been surveys of farmers specifically about these approaches and what did the surveys yield i mean so to just back up and put it in context so you know about 90 of the or more of the corn soybean um you know sugar beets in the u.s grown in the u.s are all gmos so farmers have already heavily adopted new technologies um and are open to and open to embracing them i think it's more on the consumer side where we're seeing some you know rejection or pushback so from the farmers that we've interacted with you know they are very open to trying new technologies and new techniques um but you know they just want to make sure that what they're going to get on the back end is again going to be economically viable and some of them are also very concerned about sustainability and climate change okay thank you for that um there was another question um uh must have gone to the answered section but asked about uh uh your focus on on soils and agriculture and why not in the context of forests yeah i saw i saw that one and tried to knock that out will i because it is really an interesting question uh melinda i'd love i love your thoughts on this i i basically said look we've had these discussions internally uh and it's absolutely a bandwidth issue inside the institute we basically had to choose whether we were going to go we assembled pam ronald bryan statskowitz these members of the national academy of science and basically said you know what are we going to do how can we make the biggest impact with the with the limited resources that we have and we really chose things like rice that have a significant carbon footprint our and our significant climate uh a problem and we decided to go after that and soil as sort of our first first chunk but it's absolutely on our radar we do have some thoughts and ideas there but we just don't but melinda i was going to pass it over to you for sort of the regulatory perspective of that as well yeah i mean there's a more practical reason right so agricultural lands are already disturbed so you know if you're going to make some kind of change there you don't have to be as concerned about the ecological interactions with other organisms so that's sort of one context they are also um sort of at least with um gmos right they're also somewhat cut off from those interactions with the nearby ecology so there is a pathway forward and established system for testing out new gm products regulators have an experience having experiences with them and there's a way to sort of confine your field child so that you are only looking at what's happening within that system and so it's a good way to start uh the agricultural systems are a good way to start good way to kind of test out your different theories make sure things are working as you imagine it's a good way to kind of bleeds with the regulators as a first step and then from there you can kind of go into these more complex undisturbed ecological systems um one good example is you know the gmo chestnut that has recently been approved by regulators i mean i think it took over 10 years for that to go through the regulatory process um as opposed to you know another corn or soybean that's going into an agricultural system that regulators have a lot of experience with so it's a little bit practical too on the regulatory side thank you for that i think we have time for one more question in here the question is if these crops are not gmos could they be grown by organic farmers and labeled as uh organic and could they be integrated into farms using regenerative agriculture techniques yeah so that's still a big open question that we actually asked the usda as well so um there's you know a few different agencies that are working on gmos there's um aphis which is the biotech regulator they have said you know these products are not gmos then there's the agricultural marketing service which handles the gmo labels and they have also said you know we're not you're not going to be required to label this as bioengineered if your genome editing and then there's the organic standards organization which hasn't really said anything yet there's an organic standards board that makes recommendations to the organics agency and they have recommended that genome-edited products not be included in the organic standard but then i think internally in the agency there's this tension because you don't want to have different parts of the same agency making somewhat conflicting determinations so we don't really know what the final answer is going to be yet but again i would argue that if the goal of these products is really focused on sustainability um then i would say that aligns very well with the values around organics if you're really reducing pesticide use reducing herbicide use for instance then i think that aligns well with the values of what the organic standard is trying to do so open question i would i think it should be included but right now um from the regulatory policy perspective not not sure yet thank you very much for that um we have just enough time for any final thoughts either one of you might have in this context well i i really appreciate the thoughtful questions this has been a tremendously interesting forum and uh the active questions is just absolutely phenomenal and this is this is why i came to the igi was to to be able to have these types of discussions so i really i salute those in attendance as well as your institute will you guys are doing a great job and uh again i i posted my email but it's b ring eisen just a letter b and then ring eisen at berkeley.edu i'm happy to continue any of these conversations with people that are interested this is what we need to do as a society is to have these conversations we don't have time we ran out of time about probably 10 or 20 years ago so we need to do this not tomorrow but we need to do it today and yesterday so that's i'm really excited about the prospects of the research that we're doing but having these kind of forums and discussions and people asking the types of questions that they asked are exactly the right thing uh to be doing right now so i i really think it's been a great session okay any anything else melinda no that said thank you i just want to reiterate reiterate what brad was saying like these questions are just really amazing and i think we need to go back and sit on some of them for a little while it's great to talk to smart people like your viewers and listeners who are well steeped in this field and get a little a little bit of a different perspective you know we work a lot with molecular biologists and so it's good to interact with people on the other side of things as well it's a pretty cool community so yeah we hope you will all right so uh we are at the top of the hour and so with that i'd like to uh thank our two speakers today uh brad and melinda and of course all of our um uh our participants uh and uh i hope to uh to see you again soon uh if you're not on the institute's mailing list please uh do so uh and uh we will apprise you of future events that may be relevant and uh with that i will uh close this session thank you everyone thank you thank you

2021-08-05 21:34

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