Ian Sanders wants to feed the world. A soft-spoken Brit, Sanders studies fungus genetics in a lab at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. But fear not, he’s not on a mad-scientist quest to get the world to eat protein pastes made from ground-up fungi. Still, he believes—he’s sure—that these microbes will be critical to meeting the world’s future food needs.
Sanders may have come up with a way to do just that. He has successfully bred custom varieties of microbes that can help plants produce more food. It’s one of the ultimate goals of farming research—more food with, he hopes, little or no environmental downside.
According to the FAO, most of the growth in production that we’ll need has to come from increasing yields from crop plants. Selective breeding doesn’t seem to be offering the types of dramatic yield increases seen in the past. Meanwhile, genetic engineering has yet to lead to any significant increase in yields.
Now, many scientists are saying that we’ve been looking at the wrong set of genes. Instead of in plants, the crucial genes may reside in the galaxy of bacteria and fungi that live in the soil and throughout a plant—the kind that Sanders studies.
Read the full, original story: The next green revolution may rely on microbes
