4 Mad Scientists Using Superplants to Solve Climate Change
We’ve all seen the numbers: the UN predicts that there are only eleven years left until the damage done by greenhouse gases is irreversible. And once that happens, the planet is doomed. Mass extinction events will occur around the world, sea level rises will sink entire cities, and after 2030, an additional 250,000 people will die of health risks associated with warming temperatures.
I’m not the first person to tell you that we need to do something about climate change. Chances are, I won’t even be the last one to do it today.
We’re constantly bombarded with headlines reminding us that the world is going to end if we continue to ignore this issue. And even though we’re long overdue for some serious action, all this buzz about inevitable climate catastrophes make it easy easy to abandon these kinds of efforts before we’ve even started them.
Nevertheless, there are still people pushing for change. Despite the temptation to succumb to cynicism, these four scientists haven’t lost hope. Their research focuses on the pursuit of biological technologies to remove carbon that’s already present in the atmosphere. Essentially, they’re manipulating the nature of life itself to help save the planet.
Here’s how they’re doing it:
Tobias Erb: Photosynthesis 2.0
Most people think evolution is a perfect system. When you spend millions of years adapting to the world around you, they should be pretty good at it by now. Right?
Unfortunately, some adaptations have hung onto flaws that have the potential to hurt the environment. Photosynthesis, the system a plant uses to get its energy, is one of them. It begins with a series of light-dependent reactions, which use water and sunlight to build compounds used in the consequent CBB (or Calvin) Cycle to transform carbon dioxide into sugars. If photosynthesis is how a plant “eats,” then the light-dependent reactions prepare the ingredients and the Calvin Cycle adds a couple more and then cooks them all up.
However, one of the most important enzymes in the Calvin Cycle is super inefficient. And sometimes, it mixes up carbon dioxide and oxygen, which triggers a wasteful reaction that puts more CO2 into the atmosphere when it should be taking it out.
Tobias Erb, director of the Max Planck Institute, decided to solve this problem by giving photosynthesis a much-needed upgrade. His research spawned the CETCH Cycle: a man-made alternative to the Calvin Cycle that is both more efficient and sustainable than the original process.
He began by collecting lots of data on different types of enzymes. Once he and his team narrowed down the ones that might be the most useful, he took a blank piece of paper and began drawing out metabolic pathways that could work in the real world. He drafted four of these cycles before settling on the one that would become the CETCH Cycle. It uses seventeen different enzymes from nine different organisms, three of which he designed specifically for the CETCH Cycle. A plant that uses this process could fix carbon 20% faster than one that uses photosynthesis. Plus, it wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally spitting out CO2. If every plant was built like this, we’d be three steps closer towards solving our carbon crisis.
Though he’s figured out how to make it work in vitro (or, in a test tube), there’s still the challenge of making it work in vivo (or, inside a plant). The cycle could also be engineered to produce substances that humans could use, instead of sugar. Unless somebody (or, two somebodies) beat him to it…
Daniel Nocera & Pamela Silver: The Bionic Leaf
Like Erb, this dynamic duo has created a way to convert water and sunlight into useful energy even more efficiently than photosynthesis. But they took their idea in a different direction. They created a bionic leaf that produces biodiesel, a sustainably-made gas that humans can burn for energy, instead of sugars to be used by the plant.
Chemist Daniel Nocera began the endeavor with his artificial leaf. It was a silicone-based contraption that used solar-powered electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But it wasn’t until he teamed up with Harvard’s Pamela Silver that they turned the leaf into a real bionic powerhouse.
Together, they incorporated a bacteria to the system which converted the hydrogen into biodiesel. But it didn’t work quite how they intended. They noticed that the nickel-derived catalyst Nocera used to split water in the original leaf was killing the bacteria Silver had introduced. It was creating oxygen-based molecules that destroyed the bacteria’s DNA, and made it impossible to power the leaf without an absurdly high voltage.
After a quick detour back to the drawing board, they designed a new cobalt-phosphorus alloy that didn’t produce those toxic compounds. It also upped the conversion efficiency by 10%, decreased the amount of voltage needed, and allowed the plants to make even more diverse biological compounds. Win-win-win!
One of the reasons this experiment is so significant is because of its applicability to virtually any environment. Whether you have 50 acres to your name or only enough space for a windowsill garden, you could host enough bionic plants to power your whole house! Bionic gardens could phase out fossil fuels altogether in favor of clean, biologically-produced compounds.
To me, this technology’s biggest advantage is its potential to bring food and fuel to impoverished rural regions that suffer from a lack of access to both. People living in areas without viable energy infrastructures and distributions would benefit from technology that could power their households and put dinner on the table from the comfort of their backyard.
Joanne Chory: Super Roots
We’ve already covered how plants can use photosynthesis to make the sugars it needs to survive. But what does it do with them?
Plants can use them in a lot of different ways. They can build more complex sugars called polysaccharides. These include cellulose, used to construct the cell walls, and starch, which acts as a food reserve. Plants can also use them to build carbohydrates, which can combine with other nutrients to form amino acids, which can then be woven together into the proteins that the plant needs to function.
However, when winter comes and temperatures fall, the plant dies and the sugars decompose. Most of the carbon in those sugars go right back into the atmosphere to produce CO2 and we already have enough of that around. To solve this problem, Dr. Joanne Chory developed a method to store the carbon somewhere more stable: underground.
Chory has genetically engineered certain plants to produce suberin, a carbon-storing compound found in cork, in their roots. It locks the carbon in long, stable chains that prevent other molecules from binding with it and reincorporating it into the atmosphere.
The roots she modified with this technology would be much more robust than their non-modified counterparts and could retain large amounts of carbon in a place where it couldn’t sneak back into the atmosphere. As a bonus, the roots enrich the surrounding soil with carbon, which helps it hold essential nutrients like sulfur, nitrates, and phosphate.
Today, she’s one of the top botanists in the world. She leads the Harnessing Plants Initiative at the Salk Institute and won $3 million through the Breakthrough Prize in 2018 for her accomplishments. Chory plans on incorporating this technology into crop plants to be used commercially. This way, farmers around the world could use her plants to solve climate change — one stalk of wheat at a time.
Takeaways
When all the news talks about is that it’s already too late to stop climate change, it’s easy to lose hope. But these four innovators show us that it’s not impossible. And in the face of all the defeatism around them, their rebellious optimism can seem a little mad.
But we don’t even have to be genius scientists to lend a hand in stopping climate change. We can make a donation, no matter how small, to a climate-focused nonprofit. We can support legislation to regulate the amount of carbon that cities and companies are responsible for putting into the atmosphere. Even small switches to more sustainable habits, like taking public transportation or choosing to recycle, can make a big difference. Because the only way we’re gonna save the planet is if every single one of us can do our part.
Hi! I’m Nina Maria Tremblay. I’m sixteen years old and I write about climate change. Right now, I’m also working on some AI research and organizing a campaign to switch my city to 100% renewable energy! If you wanna hear more from me, follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, read more of my articles, or subscribe to my newsletter.
Have a good day! (And if you can’t do that, have a better day!)
