Ever since the industrial revolution, we as a race have advanced so much that the world wouldn’t even be recognizable to someone from the 18th or 19th century if they were to time travel to today.

From not even knowing what electricity was, to having access to whole of humanity’s information in the palm of our hands, we sure have come a long, long way in the last few centuries.

That progress however, has come at a price. We’ve managed to screw the very planet we live on as a byproduct of our progress. From pollution and making holes in the ozone to global warming and climate change, human activities have left the planet scarred.

Even though we know that all these things will come back to haunt us, we are still not getting our act together and any effort towards a sustainable future is at its infancy at best. So, there is a need to look at every possible way we can start healing the planet and one of the most promising solutions may come from super plants.

Going Back To The Roots

Nature always had things in balance, until we showed up and started utilizing the resources of the planet unchecked. This imbalance is what is the root of the problem. One of the major sources for a lot of our problems including global warming and climate change is the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Our use of fossil fuels, coupled with rampant deforestation has had a double sided impact on the environment. To recreate the balance, we have to decrease or completely stop the use of fossil fuels and plant as many trees as possible because trees literally suck the CO2 from the air.

The transition from fossil fuels to clean energy sources and planting of enough trees around the planet could take a lot of time even with concentrated efforts. Therefore, a team of researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are launching a new initiative to create super plants that would be able to sequester 20 times more CO2 from the atmosphere.

It is a 10 year plan and they are calling the super plants, ‘harnessing plants’ and they will not only be able to help combat climate change but could also help feed the planet!

An All-In-One Plant

Image Credits: The Salk Institute

The team is aiming to engineer a leafy green plant that would have some really cool characteristics like being salt tolerant, drought tolerant, pathogen resistant, flood tolerant, and would capture 20 times more carbon than other plants its size.

They even have a lead on how they could engineer such a plant and the answer lies in a substance called suberin. Suberin is made by all plants as it protects their roots. It protects them from drought and floods and also pathogens.

On top of that, suberin is one of the most stable forms of carbon and is very difficult for bacteria and fungi to break down and therein lies the answer to the carbon problem. The team wants to breed a variety of plants that can produce a lot more suberin so that they can make bigger root systems with more suberin that go deeper into the ground.

So, what will happen is, these super plants will such the carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it in their root systems. Since bacteria or fungi won’t be able to break down these roots, the carbon won’t be released back to the atmosphere.

To have a real impact on the environment, the teams states that 5% of the world’s crop land is what is needed to plant these super plants, which is a huge goal. But the team remains optimistic, both about being able to engineer such a plant as well as its wide adoption.