Little green tufts poke out of soil. Many gardeners know the rush of excitement that comes with spotting these signs of new life.
But the Salk Institute’s Wolfgang Busch is more interested in what's underneath the soil: roots. To the biologist, plants’ fibrous anchors could be a dirty solution to clean up Earth’s atmosphere.
“Roots are at the center of all these challenges related to climate change,” he said. “The more roots we put in the soil, the more carbon that has been taken up from the atmosphere gets stored in the soil.”
Plants are experts at taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into organic materials that can be harvested and eaten. But deep root systems may be better at capturing that carbon dioxide and storing it in the soil for longer.
Now, Busch and his team will investigate if soybeans with deeper root systems than other plants can remove more carbon from the atmosphere and are more resilient to climate change.
The Bezos Earth Fund granted the Salk Institute $18 million to fund the new three-year project called ROOTS. The team will stress test genetically altered soybean plants from the lab in the field. They will build an artificial intelligence tool that dramatically accelerates research timelines, getting those experimental plants into the real world sooner.
“We know that plants can help us, and understanding plants better and making plants based on this foundational research can help us to mitigate many of the bad consequences,” Busch said.
The results could help cool the warming planet and fight against climate change. More than 40% of roots are made up of pure carbon. Shallow rooted plants that are likely to get uprooted by titling or environmental causes often decompose quickly. This releases the carbon once stored in its roots back into the atmosphere.
However, plants with deep roots stay in the ground longer — storing the carbon dioxide they capture from the atmosphere in the soil. They are also more equipped to handle environmental stressors such as droughts. Their longer roots can access moisture farther down in the dirt.
The project builds on previous research from the Harnessing Plant Initiative, a Salk program that identified 347 gene candidates that are best suited for creating plants with deeper roots. Busch is developing plant varieties with these optimized genes.
He estimates if farmers use the crops widely in the agriculture industry, the deeper rooted crops could remove one gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
“A gigaton of carbon dioxide removal would basically be all cars that have a combustion engine in the United States being replaced by non-emitting cars. It's a big big thing,” Busch said.
While the genes hold promise, testing them in the lab and bringing them into the field is a time consuming process. Just testing the genes in a lab takes more than a year. Once they are ready for farmers, there’s no guarantee the plant varieties will be successful outside.
“Whatever we develop in the lab or in the greenhouses here can fail in the real world because the real world is complicated,” Busch said. “A farm is very different from a research environment.”
Salk scientists aim to resolve these issues by developing RootGPT, an open access artificial intelligence tool that weeds through Salk’s database and tells researchers what genetic changes they should make based on their desired outcome. The database includes billions of genetic letters that have been sequenced across different crop species and millions of root system measurements.
Busch believes RootGPT can shorten the experimental process from a year and a half to three weeks. The expedited experiments will help Salk scientists tackle the race against the climate clock.
“Climate change is a challenge with a time component. It's really urgent. We don't want to cross some of these tipping points that make it really hard to fix stuff or to mitigate stuff,” Busch said.
The team is still building the tool. Busch hopes the final version will be complete by 2028.
